The tagline for Sunlight Café, a 2002 cookbook by Mollie Katzen, is “Breakfast served all day”. The recipes are all vegetarian; most include so many suggested variations on them that you could easily try a different breakfast every day for a year.
I’ve written about Sunlight Café before, but that was when it was cold outside and hot breakfasts were the thing. This morning it was already hot out (in the high 70s) and I had some ricotta cheese to use up, so I looked in the index (which is excellent, BTW) and found a recipe for Breakfast Salad. It’s a free-form kind of recipe. Basically, you take a combination of crisp, chopped veggies (e.g. tomato, red pepper, scallions) toss them with olive oil and a little salt and then with crumbled feta or ricotta salata. (I don’t know what ricotta salata is. I just used regular Dragone-brand ricotta. Will have to look up to see if they’re the same thing.) Add hard- or soft-boiled egg (still warm is good) and additional salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle with sunflower seeds. (I used toasted pine nuts, which were also left over from something else.)
Why I love this cookbook
Breakfast Salad is a simple recipe that experienced home cooks would be able to glance at and then make up their own version of, and really wouldn’t need a recipe at all. But I don’t think I would have thought of making a salad for breakfast if Mollie Katzen hadn’t given me the idea! Also, the cookbook provides complete instructions on everything a beginner cook might wonder about, including how to boil eggs. (I checked to see if I was hardboiling my eggs as directed, and I was, at least according to Mollie Katzen. Since she is one of my favorite food gurus, that’s good enough for me. No green-rimmed yolks!) Actually, she probably explains ricotta salata, too, but I’m supposed to be working on stuff for Bloggiesta this weekend, not Weekend Cooking, so I’m not going to check now!
Mollie Katzen hasn’t posted her recipe for Breakfast Salad in her online recipe archives, but you’ve already got the basic idea from the pictures and my description. You can make the proportions to suit your own taste, and besides, you really want the whole cookbook, anyway!
You can find a similar description of the recipe in this post about making salad for breakfast on Culinate.
This post is part of Weekend Cooking, a weekly feature on Beth Fish Reads. Click on the image for more Weekend Cooking posts.