The Recipe

Stirring Some Culinary Controversy.

A recipe in The New York Times Cooking Section caught my eye, for quinoa and broccoli spoon salad. In addition to broccoli and quinoa, it featured roasted pecans, dried cranberries, tart apple and cheddar cheese. Yum! I can’t tell you how unusual it was, for a recipe to capture my attention. I’m a proudly perfunctory cook, and like to prepare the same broiled chicken or salmon night after night. But this salad sounded incredible. I showed it to Sam and told him I was going to buy the ingredients.

“Maybe make it for a night I’m not going to be home,” he said.

“Why? What’s the problem?”

“You lost me at quinoa.”

Fine. I would make it when my daughters were around. They adore salad. I kept salivating over the photograph and list of ingredients, spoiling to share a scrumptious recipe which the Times assured me “fits loads of texture and flavor onto a spoon by combining finely chopped raw broccoli with chewy dried cranberries, crunchy pecans, fluffy quinoa, tart apple and chunks of sharp Cheddar cheese” and could be produced in under 30 minutes. I called my daughter Sarah, a skilled cook and salad maker, and tripping over my words, told her all about it.

“Wow, she said. “Raw broccoli and apple?”

 “Yep,” I said.

“Maybe I would wait until I knew I was going to be alone for a day or two,” she told me. “It sounds like a heaping bowlful of farts.”

I trust Sarah, but was, initially, undeterred. I decided to defy everyone and make it for myself, but then went over the practical and logistical implications and instead, chucked the recipe into recycling. There seemed to be no reason to put any of us through it. Instead, I just defrosted some chicken.