Impromptu Salad

Sometimes things sound so much more exotic in English – I would pour over food blogs and recipe books wistfully – how nice cilantro, dill and buckwheat sound. And why don’t we get them here? Then I started googling – the bubble burst when I discovered they were just vilayat kothamalli, sabsige and kuttu!!! Not daydreaming of them now am I?

And it’s the same reaction I got from my family when I made the salad I’m posting today.

They called me ‘what did you have for lunch?’ – whaaaat? chole and avarakkai salad? you didn’t even cook the avarakkai? what, Nina?

No Appa, it’s a beautiful chickpea salad with cherry… tomatoes, lightly pickled onions and tender snow peas.

Oh WOW! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?

I did Dad…only avarakkai and chole sound like a dastardly combination!

The days are getting hotter and though I send a packed lunch for my family, I find I’m unable to deal with hot cooked food, especially in the afternoons. So I normally end up cutting up cucumbers and tomatoes in a bowlful of curd, topping it with a sprinkle of bhujia or crisps and voila! my meal is ready.

The other day however, i didn’t have my lunch time staples in the refrigerator. Sometimes my refrigerator is full to the brim but with nary a ready-to-eat morsel in it. This is what I found inside my fridge:
some cooked chickpeas
some cherry tomatoes – which I halved
some snow peas – that I snapped in half
some fresh paneer that I cubed
about a handful of pomegranate
half an onion, sliced and left in lemon juice [from the previous night's dinner] they were now pink

I threw them all into a bowl. I actually didn’t add any salt or pepper. Just let it all marinate in the onion lime juices.

It was yum! I wouldn’t have thought that all this would have worked together – but it did. Light, crisp, a little lemony and packed with protein.

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