Two Spicy, Fortifying Salads to Carry You Through to Spring

A Thai Pork Tenderloin Salad and Couscous with Roasted Winter Vegetables, Nuts, and Dried Fruit

Imagine: this couscous salad, already chock-full of winter vegetables and dried fruit, next gets drenched in spicy lemon dressing and showered with nuts and herbs. Don’t serve it out of the Tupperware! Unless you want to.

I’VE GASSED ON AND ON AND ON in this newsletter about how anything can be a salad and a salad can be anything. Unlike baked goods, which require the soul of a scientist, or grilling, which has a swashbuckling aspect that I feel unqualified to execute, salad floats through life unhindered by mankind’s insistence on compartmentalizing. Of all the dishes in the culinary universe, it has the fewest restrictions.

Salad is the drunk dancer at the wedding, oblivious and full of joy. Salad is a Beat poet who sometimes makes no sense but still manages to be so beautiful. Salad will not let you fence it in. Salad, quite frankly, is the kind of person I’d like to be.

If salad were a Beat Poet: Allen Ginsberg in London’s Hyde Park in 1967. (Getty images)

I have seen the best culinary minds of my generation try to fence salad in. All of them fall away, defeated.

I admire salad, obviously. But I will admit that there are (rare) times when I think to myself: I might not want salad today. Just recently, during a fit of mild, meandering despondency, I looked into my refrigerator and pantry and felt uninspired. Nothing was adding up. (I reminded myself of a funny woman I once knew, who said she couldn’t make dinner if all she had was ingredients.)

In general, I decide on the salads we offer here according to things I think you might like or that you might never have made for yourself or would be happy to be reminded about. But sometimes it is all about me.

My goddaughter/cousin, Mariah, and her boyfriend, Yoel, partaking of my hospitality, which includes no placemats, mismatched everything, and you have to get your own food and I hope you brought your own drinks.

I was tired of being cold. I was dreaming about spring vegetables (soon! they’ll be here soon!) I wanted cozy food that would precede a nap or a long session of streaming old movies. I wanted a giant steak sandwich. Or a Moroccan tagine. And when was the last time I’d had delicious pork tenderloin?

Craving animal protein and spice, I reminded myself that—of course—there had to be a great pork tenderloin salad out there; in fact, I’d researched a Thai one ages ago. And a couscous salad could come very close to satisfying my tagine cravings, at least a little bit. (And if I wanted a steak sandwich salad, the Nunn Family Steak Panzanella, from The Department of Salad Archive, comes very close to being one.

My jumping-off point for the tenderloin was the great Rosa’s Thai Cafe cookbook. It’s a simple breeze of a recipe. To cook the thinly sliced pork, you’re basically blanching it in simmering water—quick and very little mess to clean up.

But thanks to the swaggery hubris that comes from over-reading about a particular recipe, I decided I’d give it some flair. (Almost always a mistake.)

I ended up with a quite different and delicious salad and a dressing so extremely spicy that after I served the two different versions—normal and thermonuclear—at a little family get-together, I had to lie on the couch all day the next day. (Which is why this newsletter is a bit late; I think I had a chili-pepper hangover.) I am giving you a much milder version of the dressing today. We’re all spicy food lovers, but when it comes to Thai bird peppers, I recommend restraint. If you decide to double the dressing recipe, you don’t necessarily have to double the chili count.

The couscous salad is a winterized version of a salad we’ve shared here before. I started out with pearl couscous, which I love, but ended up going back to regular, because I found its texture with roasted winter vegetables just unbeatable and I love the way it soaks up the dressing.