Savory Roasted Pear, Lentil, Walnut, and Blue Cheese 🍐 and an Autumn Tricolore: Pretty and Delicious Salads Perfect for Parties / Buffets / Lunch / Supper 🍽️

Also: Help yourself to some self-help masquerading as salad instruction.

Autumn Tricolore Salad with Toasted Pepitas and Green Goddess Vinaigrette

I HAVE BEEN SURPRISED by so many things this week! I’ve been practically drunk on astonishment—which I’d usually consider a good thing, because nothing makes me happier. Jump out from behind a bush and yell BOO!—please! Tell me you almost accidentally married your first cousin! Show extreme kindness or generosity for no reason at all. Casually mention you once dated Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Unfortunately, rather than good, amusing ones, these managed to be predictable and disappointing surprises—if that makes sense. (I’m sure we’ve all felt that way on some level.)

Roasted pears, with lots of black pepper and thyme, are so good with lentils.

Luckily for you (and me, and anyone who might stumble upon this newsletter in a thousand years—or tomorrow), I’m not going to write about them, because: A. Who wants to read that? And B. In order to do so, I’d have to put gas in a car I stored in the garage ages ago and promised myself I’d quit driving. By which I mean my Fret Mobile ™️.

It’s like the Batmobile, except rather than getting there in the nick of time, it navigates the same old roads repeatedly, solves nothing, rescues no one, and never arrives at its destination (unless you consider “emotionally drained” some place you’d like to go). So: the opposite of heroic.

I’d rather drive the Batmobile, but I got stuck with the Fret Mobile.

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A small REQUEST. . .

Please hit the ❤️ button at the bottom of this newsletter if you like it here! —Emily

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Fun fact: My sidekick version of Batman’s Robin—the boys in the lab— came into my life as the result of my former (🤞) bad habit of ruminating. An old friend would listen to me ask the same questions about the same events or people over and over—Why would he say that? What makes her act this way? Why does this happen?—and finally respond: You know what, Emily, I think we’re going to have to send this one out to the boys in the lab, to see what they can make of it.

It took me years to realize that while he was being his usual funny and kind self, he was also trying to make me see that I was wasting my time (and annoying him). I wish I’d figured out sooner that people become more the way they are rather than the way you wish they magically would or could be. And that it’s no one’s job to fix anyone but themselves. And P.S., don’t take people’s bad personalities personally any more than you’d want them to take yours.

Raw butternut squash shavings go into the Autumn Tricolore Salad with Toasted Pepitas and Green Goddess Vinaigrette

I haven’t heard from this friend in years, but he’d be surprised and proud of me if he knew that my new code for living is: Tolerate the people who upset you—but don’t be a doormat; try to change situations that limit you; direct your energy toward more important things in the world; and do what makes you happy in the meantime.

Easy, right? I’m now like an expensive self-cleaning oven. Or, at the very least, a cheap self-help book.

But I don’t think you’ll be surprised to know that I found my antidote to all this—the thing that “makes me happy in the meantime”—in my kitchen. I directed my bizarre talent for focusing obsessively for hours on boring crap toward instead looking for surprising ways to invigorate my autumn salads. And that has made all the difference.

Toast your own pumpkin seeds/pepitas. You won’t be sorry!

After thinking for a bit about ingredients that have surprised me in bad ways, I turned some of them into dishes that surprised me in good ways. Put that on a t-shirt, why don’t you?

The first was raw winter squash, which I saw in a salad on Food52 a few years ago, and am seeing more frequently these days. I remember thinking, Why do that? Especially when winter squash requires so little energy to transform into something luxurious.

Ingredients for my Autumn Tricolore Salad with Toasted Pepitas and Green Goddess Vinaigrette before the vinaigrette

The other was fruit in legume salads. As anyone who has been a longtime subscriber here knows, I’m a big proponent of fruit in vegetable salads—I’d even say you’re missing out if you build fences between the two. The fruit and legumes combo, though, has always stopped me. One in particular that seems to be popping up all over the salad landscape recently (and that has probably been around for a long time, but I blocked it) is roasted pear and lentil; my thoughts were: Nah.

Ingredients for my Savory Roasted Pear, Lentil, and Blue Cheese Salad with Walnuts and Scallions

Boy, was I wrong about both—happily so. I ended up with two recipes—one warm and earthy, the other bright, big-flavored, and crunchy—that would always be on my standard party or buffet menu if I ran a catering company.