For the protein, egg or feta or blue cheese work as well as tofu taste wise.
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I'd say this is equivalent or better than a Sweetgreens type lunch salad at 20% of the cost. I'd guess this costs me about $2 and it costs about $10 at a salad chain place.
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Wife does the jalapeno pickling and the tofu seasoning. The tofu takes some iterations to get right, but basically squeeze out water under a heavy weight, dice, spritz with oil, season with umami seasoning, nutritional yeast or just salt and pepper, bake at 450 for ~25min.
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The carrots can be chopped ahead of time, but the cucumber and tomato are best chopped fresh.
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It's tempting to do lots of batch prep, and even make 80% done salads in individual portions and only add the last 20%, but I've found that kinda screws up the freshness a bit. Take the 10 minutes... 30-70 prep/real-time is significantly better than 80-20.
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At the very least, never do tomatoes ahead of time. Only fresh chopped room-temperature tomatoes. Refrigerating tomatoes, or worse, refrigerating chopped ones, is the cardinal sin of veg food. And use tomatoes on the tart side, not sweet. I dislike current rise of sweet tomatoes.
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I use half an avocado for this salad, which means half the time I use a refrigerated half, which isn't ideal, but fine. If you don't know how to do avocado logistics, here's the trick.
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Replying to @Prigoose
My trick is to push gently on stalk. If it easily pops into flesh, it’s ripe. So I buy unripe, do stalk-push test daily once they turn dark, move into fridge when test passes to stage for eating.
So hack is: buy only unripe with a stalk, and maintain ripening queue of ~3-4
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I'm trying to make at least 50% of my lunches this salad and variants, kinda hard to keep up, but I'm kinda almost there.
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The fall-off-the-wagon part for me is the lettuce prep. We go farmer's market on Sunday, and if I don't do the prep right away, the lettuce sits there, dirty and wilting, and the effort to get to a lunch salad is too high. And pre-washed/chopped grocery store lettuce sucks.
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Hmm Mansion Salad is a good name for this. Oh, and I sometimes add pickled beets, but it's too much work and too stainy to be part of the canonical recipes. But a great substitute or addition to the carrot note is radishes.
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Replying to @vgr
Mansion salad
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Replying to
This is why, though I like radishes in this, I rarely do them because it's an effort to maintain a radish supply chain. It goes in nothing else I eat routinely. There's no efficiency of scope.
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Update: I’ve increased the batch prep levels so the on,y thing I don’t do ahead of time is tomatoes/avocados. I even put in a lemon slice ready to squeeze in the prepped kit.
Dump kit into bowl, add tomatoes, squeeze the lemon, salt and pepper, mix, done. 2 minute finish-prep.
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Edit to above: I’ve taken to pre-chopping and adding cucumber to the kits for up to 3 days. Not ideal but good tradeoff. I actually do tranched prep: 3 full kits made on Sunday, rest of salad and chopped things separated, cucumber peeled but only partly chopped.
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So Thursday is second tranche prep where I make 2-3 more kits. But this takes much less time than Sunday main prep.
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