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.
I like the sound of this breakfast! Especially on a hot day. Ricotta and ricotta salt cheese are very different things – ricotta is the soft, mild kind that’s in lasagna and ricotta salata is a harder cheese that’s really salty…often served in salads.
I thought that might be the case when the recipe said feta or ricotta salata! I guess I didn’t want to know at the time, because I wanted to use up that open ricotta! (Willful denial, it’s called.) Thanks! Now I know for the future.
Love the idea of salad for breakfast. Must look for this cookbook!
I’m still thinking about that salad for breakfast. Might be good, but I think I like my cheese inside my eggs, like in an omelette. LOL
All day breaakfast – fun! Cheers from Carole’s Chatter!
I love Mollie Katzen! I’ve been buying her cookbooks from her early Moosewood days. I too love the idea of breakfast salad. I bet this would work with yogurt too.
Tis sounds like a great breakfast to easily feed a crowd too.
Happy cooking
Shelleyrae @ Book’d Out
Mollie Katzen is the best! I’ll bet the warm hard-boiled eggs just made this salad!
Breakfast salad. Interesting.
Yes, plus the recipe says you can go ahead and mix the oil and veggies up the night before and just add the cheese and egg in in the morning.
Yes, is fifty-three too old to learn to like plain Greek yogurt? I need to!
You don’t sound convinced, Marg! 😉
Yes she even says if you like your yolks runny, that the yolk will form a kind of sauce in the dish. But I prefer hard-boiled eggs!
I like omelets and frittatas, too, but I had one for breakfast the day before! But is there such a thing as a ricotta omelet? Scrambled eggs and ricotta might be good, too.
I didn’t know about this Molly Katzen cookbook! Looks like a fun one to peruse and I sure like the look of that salad you made.
I just had the leftovers for breakfast this morning! The cookbook is my favorite for when I want something different for breakfast!
Boy, that breakfast salad sounds refreshing and tasty.
I’ve recently been introduced to salads for breakfast and it seemed a weird idea at first but then, why not? You can customise it accordingly after all. Yours does look suitably breakfast-like. And yummy.