The Summer's #1 Miso Green Bean Shiitake Salad! Plus, 2025's #4 Sesame Soba Noodle Salad!

Just kidding. I have no idea how these delicious salad's would rank. I'm trying to be an influencer.

Green Bean Shiitake Salad with Lemony Miso Dressing

YOU’D THINK THAT IF ALL OF US were truly as virtuous as we try to be, or as we profess to be, the world would be perfect. Unfortunately, I did some math on this, and my calculations revealed that the world would be exactly the same as it is right now, or close. And by “calculations” I mean I watched one of the most legendary episodes of The Twilight Zone, “Eye of the Beholder.”

In case you’re not familiar, it’s about a woman who has just undergone her 11th surgery in order to remedy her abnormal appearance, which is so repulsive it could get her sent away to an island for people deemed visually unacceptable by the government. When the as-yet-unseen doctors remove her bandages, the operation has been a disastrous and stunning failure. But the twist: She’s a total babe—and the “normal” medical team all have grotesque, twisted pig faces.

Donna Douglas, in “Eye of the Beholder.”

This episode of The Twilight Zone reminded me that, like beauty, virtue is also in the “eye of the beholder.” Many of the things we do in the name of rightness are good and many of them are also pretty terrible. But we can probably always find people who will behold us positively (or negatively) no matter what we do.

For instance, I could start a campaign tomorrow warning people that aliens live inside of the moon, which is why the American astronauts (who may or may not have landed there on July 20, 1969) didn’t see them hiding in their moon cellars, watching us from telescopic cameras, learning our habits in order to take over the planet and turn us into their slaves.

My shiitake mushrooms weren’t perfect. They were delicious.

Depending on the types of people I’d been surrounding myself with and the level of charisma and energy I applied to promoting my “beliefs,” I could conceivably become a messiah to many. (And, sure, a pariah to others.) And possibly even take over the world if I felt like it. How hard could it be?

Right and wrong. Good and bad. Real and fake. On paper, it all seems pretty simple. But when there are human beings involved, it becomes a crazy tightrope walk, involving a frighteningly delicate balance.

And yet the planet, unimaginably, keeps spinning.

How we keep this word spinning is beyond me. (Getty)

So it’s never a bad idea to re-evaluate your most cherished beliefs and values, especially if you got them from, say, a wildly popular televangelist who lives in a mansion and has threesomes with his wife and the pool boy or from an extremely expensive crystal-ball-reading fortune-teller you met in Palm Springs after a bad breakup, who made you feel loved and important. And even if you got them from your beloved parents. Or from your husband or your wife.

But—and here’s my point, which is proportionally very small compared to the questions of the moral universe—it’s also never a bad idea take an inventory of your self-proclaimed personal virtues and ask yourself if you might be talking the talk in public without walking the walk in your daily life.

The taped, pre-portioned packets of soba noodles are usually 4 ounces each.

I’m speaking about myself, of course, and preaching to my own personal inner choir. In terms of this newsletter, I realized that I talk a lot about reviling food waste, but—like so many of us—I also waste a lot of food.

Not long ago, I had two extravagant, highly seasonal salads bouncing around my brain that required driving all the hell over the place to get ingredients. When I got to my favorite farmer’s market, it was chockablock with gorgeous produce but it was also crowded with hungry, anxious humans who were giving off a vibe I can only describe as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I felt so overwhelmed that I drove right back home with no groceries.

If they made a wallpaper out of beautiful shallots I’d definitely buy it.

It’s often very inconvenient to be me, but I live with it. The upside is that when I got back, I realized that I never should have gone looking for fresh ingredients, anyway, because my refrigerator was as crowded as the farmer’s market had felt. I had been setting myself up to waste food

I know it’s the habit of food writers to inform readers repeatedly that the secret to making good food is buying the freshest, highest quality ingredients available (which has always seemed frankly condescending to me). But another (not) secret is this: You might have the ingredients for a pretty great meal in your house already, even if they’re not picture perfect and fresh as a daisy.

So today’s salads are—as God is my witness—made mostly from ingredients I already had in my house, some of which were beginning to show their age a bit. Big deal. There’s nothing wrong with that! You cull a bean, trim a stem, remove a bruise.