something kind of wild i’ve noticed about being an adult: i’ve spent exponentially more time reminding myself that “fuck it, i’m an adult, i can eat veggies for breakfast if i want to” than i’d envisioned while growing up, playing house, romanticizing things such as doing laundry (???), and thinking about all the cake i would one day be eating for breakfast. (yes, adulthood involves some eating of cake for breakfast, but most mornings i can’t even stomach the idea of eating a bowl of sugary cereal). enter: the israeli salad.
and yeah, this can be enjoyed for any and every meal of the day (veggies for dessert, anyone?), but i’m not exaggerating when i say that after preparing a big bowl of this one evening and reluctantly sticking it in the fridge after using after last spoonful of my self control to not eat it all right then and there, i literally jumped out of bed at 6 am the next morning, so excited to eat breakfast that i found myself unable to get back to sleep. but vegetables are sometimes worth losing sleep over, you know???????
in molly yeh‘s wonderful book, molly on the range, she recommends, in her recipe titled “my every morning breakfast for the summer”, serving the salad with greek yogurt or labneh, tahini, a fried egg, and bread or pita for scooping it all up. while that sounds amazing, i don’t always need quite that much food in the morning and thus far have been “settling” (it’s not really settling if it makes you a happy happy girl and you don’t even know what you’re missing or whatever) for a big scoop of israeli salad next to a crispy-yet-runny olive-oil basted fried egg. the feeling of breaking the yolk and watching it run happily towards the cucumbers and tomatoes has got to be up there with taking off heels at the end of a long day or coming home to a pet who loves you.
in between my first time making this salad this summer in mid-june and my second time making it two or three weeks later, everything in my life was kind of unexpectedly turned upside down as i packed up my cookbooks and my dog and not much else and moved (temporarily) halfway across the country to virginia! (a somewhat explanation for my absence) but these morning veggies were there to greet me on a stormy morning in my apartment in minnesota, and on my parents’ porch-with-a-view-of-the-mountains a couple of weeks later, and i’m convinced that they can get me through just about anything.
-kara
note: all images in this post are based on the fabulous illustrations and photographs in molly on the range !
