Send Salads Packing?Yes, Please!🧳 🥗

Dishes that will be there for you when you need them and go where you ask them to go

Grapefruit Spoon Salad with Almost Nuoc Cham

YOU KNOW WHAT’S NICE? Opening the fridge at lunchtime with low hopes and a dark heart and finding something really bright and good in there, which you’d managed to forget about, even though you put it in there just last night. I’m talking about forgotten leftovers, which are better than finding $20 on the street—plus you don’t have to worry about the person who lost them, poor guy. (You can worry about why you forgot about them another time.)

But it’s still the case, here in 2025, that if you say the word “salad,” most people do not conjure the idea of delicious leftovers.

Many of us leafy green stalwarts love to have our slightly wilted salads from last night’s dinner as our breakfast, but it’s probably safe to say that once the kitchen is cleaned up all around the world, plenty of these types of salads don’t make it into the Tupperware.

Roasted Eggplant, Peppers, and Farro Salad with Preserved Lemon Dressing always makes it into the Tupperware.

Which means they can’t make it to our workplaces the next day, to be lunch.

Which makes me shudder. So I’m on a newly invigorated quest to locate and/or create salads that are delicious the next day, and that also pack well. Because judging from the news, it’s starting to look like we’re all going to be scrimping on groceries, eating more leftovers, having more lunches at our desks, and making fewer trips to the fancy salad shops we once loved so much (and which, frankly, have been going downhill).

It’s time to get out your Beatles lunchbox.

But the state of the world economy aside, I’ve always been a fan of leftovers. In fact, I’ve always fantasized about opening a restaurant that serves nothing but yesterday’s dinner and another one that serves nothing but lunchbox fare. And I’m talking not just about food that travels well and won’t kill you if it sits at room temperature until lunchtime; I want to serve dishes that you can trade with the people sitting at the next table if theirs seem better than yours.

So I’m excited about my new mission. And for me, grain salads are the first type that come to mind when it comes to designing both menus. Depending on what baubles and prizes you put in them, they’re salads with fortitude—they get better in the fridge overnight (or a couple of nights) and improve in flavor after they come to room temperature. I got the idea to make the one I have for you today when I spotted some pretty Rosa Bianca eggplants at the market. It’s basically a simplified caponata folded into dressed farro, and it feels like a treat to me. I should mention: this salad is delicious right after it’s made, too.