A Sparky Sesame-Ginger Broccoli Salad

With cashews! (For those of us who don't usually LOVE broccoli salad.)

THIS IS GOING TO BE A QUICK ONE TODAY, because I had to spend two days away from my apartment, and my kitchen, in a hotel room, for reasons I don’t want to go into except to say that the circumstances were beyond my control and that I was very very mildly traumatized. I would have asked the boys in the lab to fill in for me, but they’re at some kind of pickleball jamboree in Palm Springs. When they get back, we’re going to have a serious talk.

Pickleball: The jazzy sport. (RichLegg, Getty Images)

Comeuppance is a big thing around the Department of Salad lately, but in my case it has less to do with taking too many vacation days and more to do with personal discomfiture about having reviled three-bean salad for most of my life until I made one I like, which I shared with you last week. Now, I can’t get enough of it and I act like I invented three-bean salad. It’s unseemly!

But here I am doing it again this week, with a broccoli salad that embodies Don Draper’s dictum (over iceberg wedges with blue cheese, no less) that if you don’t like what’s being said, you change the conversation.

I’m not sure I love what’s usually said about broccoli salad: That it needs to be quite sweet and creamy. A lot of recipes include dried fruit and nuts; some add grated cheese. Many suggest you put bacon in there, too.

And I’m not constitutionally against any of these treatments. But I do feel that broccoli salad has a lot more to say. And one of the things it whispered in my ear recently, as I was relishing a small takeout container of a particularly delicious version, is: I like being treated this way.

It was so simple—distinctively dressed with sesame oil and something tart, allowing the broccoli to assert its most vibrant personality.

Sesame oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, lime, ginger: Where’s the bad?

So I went home and whipped up not a facsimile but a gingery, garlicky, lime-enhanced elaboration on that wonderful little broccoli takeout salad (which arrived with some grilled maple salmon I ordered; that’s a good combination).

I’m not doing anything terribly original here. But I am demonstrating that getting more salad into your life can be as easy as changing the conversation.