Warm Lentil Salad with Butternut Squash and Brown Butter Vinaigrette
As I shared a few weeks back, I took on an elimination eating plan a few months ago. One of the things I found most difficult about the diet was the elimination of olives, which also meant olive oil. Yikes! – a mainstay of my California style cooking, not to mention my almost every day go-to salad dressing oil.
Coming up with interesting sauces and dressings for salads was a real challenge and required thinking outside my box. Fortunately, canola and grapeseed oils were acceptable, if not too exciting. I experimented with various premium nut oils, like hazelnut and walnut – okay, mostly to be consumed in small quantities, and also not an option I particularly loved. And a tahini dressing was on the table occasionally. One of the most surprisingly pleasant dressings I experimented with, though, was a brown butter vinaigrette (fortunately, dairy was only mildly restricted). It may not be the most suitable for light lettuce salads, but I found it quite a yummy option for other kinds of salads.
I came up with this legume and vegetable salad for a neighborhood Christmas potluck, and found myself devouring the leftovers in the days afterwards. Besides lentils, a main ingredient in the salad is roasted butternut squash, an item I fell in love with while on this eating plan – and okay, it didn’t hurt that the salad is studded with crispy cubes of pancetta, either. But one has to splurge a bit on luxurious ingredients when there are so many to avoid. Thankfully, one of New Orleans’ most long time and famed Italian groceries, Central Grocery, has wonderfully meaty pancetta.
A bonus tip- lentils are the Italian equivalent of Southerners’ black-eyed peas, eaten at the New Year for luck and prosperity. So enjoy this lucky out of the box salad soon!
[amd-yrecipe-recipe:13]
