Pickled Cabbage with Chick Peas and Black Beans

Simplicity belies goodness in this case. I love a hearty, easy bean salad. It’s a pack a protein punch of a lunch. I pickled the finely sliced green cabbage by soaking it in rice vinegar and sea salt until it wilted and gave way, then I added minced jalapeno pepper, chopped red onion, and tossed the whole thing in some olive oil. I seasoned with ground cumin and tossed again with the legumes. Then I ate it for a few work lunches in a row mixed in with a lot of torn red leaf lettuce and fresh tarragon. It’s worth a try. On rainy cool May days, it was my beacon of light, my surge of raw goodness.

Legumes freeze well, did you know? Sometimes I am overly zealous and I cook too much rice, too many beans, for a single person’s sustenance, even over the course of a few days. The cooked-from-dry legumes do surprisingly well in the freezer. I packed up some chickpeas recently in a glass tupperware and froze them. A week later, I thawed them in the fridge, and tossed them back into a salad dish the next day. They were firm, not mushy, and with all the depth of character they had on their first go around.

p.s. I’m already on #39 of my 50 salads. This is blasphemy. I have so much more to explore. So I’m rejigging the series, and adding another 51 salads, rounding out to a lovely number of 101.