This is a salad, but what am I
Radicchio bean salad with pesto dressing
Noah started graduate school recently, but even before he started school, in the five or so months between getting accepted and beginning to attend, when people asked what he did he would say he was a student. This always struck me as weird because he was technically not a student yet, but whatever. I tend to get hung up on technicalities, but it is an easy answer, I suppose. Sounds purposeful.
I have been unemployed for a long time now, and I still haven’t found an answer to “what do you do” that isn’t sort of sad and desperate. (It’s actually gotten more sad and desperate as the months wear on, if you can believe it.) I’ve gone down to visit Noah at school a few times and his classmates invariably ask me this question (they’re all super nice but this is my beef with ambitious people, always politely asking about your profession) and then I’m like. uh. well.
So I say something like “well theoretically I’m a librarian” or “I was a librarian but I got laid off in January” and then it’s sort of awkward and the conversation dies off. Or, worse, they say “that sounds fun!” because they’re trying to be courteous. Thank you, I appreciate your effort. It’s not fun.
I was thinking that a sort of chic way of saying that I’m unemployed is to say “I’m a writer.” This may imply some things that are not true, but I am, currently, writing a stupid newsletter, so who really knows. Am I a writer? I have written… things… on a screen. Am I a writer in the sense of it being my profession? No. Not at all. It’s not even a semi-lucrative hobby. (Writing has paid for exactly zero of Miss Noodle’s diet dog food. Okay that’s not true, it’s paid for two bags of dog food.)
One of my greatest shames is that I do honestly think that everyone should read my little newsletters. Unfortunately admitting that is really embarrassing like “oh you have this creative outlet and you want recognition for it? get in line loser.” So I try to keep this to myself because wanting recognition is gauche. Having an ambition that you know you will almost certainly never fulfil doesn’t feel good.
When I was in high school I sort of wanted to do journalism. Then I looked at the field and I thought “actually what I want is to get paid a reasonable salary and have benefits and retire someday” so I gave that interest up very quickly. It seemed hard, and honestly, I would be bad at it. One of my childhood friends is a journalist and she said to me the other day that when you weren’t busy you should just be calling people non-stop. I’m glad that I didn’t follow that path after high school, I would not have lasted long in a cold calling based career.
And besides, when I was in high school on the “journalism” track it was really just… exactly this. This is what I have always done. I truly don’t know how to do anything else. Everything I try to do just winds up as recipe headnotes. I wasn’t meant to make phone calls and like, report things. This isn’t a job though. It’s definitely not something I can tell all the gunners who go to school with Noah about. “Food blogger” was a profession I tried to make work as a kid and you just have to be different. Hustling. Grinding. Taking beautiful pictures. Editing those pictures to make them even more beautiful. Thinking about what other people are interested in. Not for me.
One thing that you do a lot of when you’re unemployed is think about your passions, your interests, what sort of job you could have. (At least you are told to do this by various career coaches and government sponsored websites.) I’m not a liar, not a dishonest person, but I never actually tell the truth when I have to answer those questions. I know what I want to do, I have since I was a child, but also I know my limits. I know what is possible for me, and what is not possible. I want to have a job, with healthcare, I want to retire someday (preferably before 65). I don’t want to fling myself at a dying industry, because I lack the stamina for it.
So I won’t be telling Noah’s classmates that I’m a writer when they ask, even though I really do think it would be super chic. I am an unemployed slacker who logs onto the department of labor website every monday to claim unemployment. I can’t tell them that either though. What do I do? Well mostly I sit at home and apply for jobs, and then ask whoever will listen “what’s wrong with me?” when I inevitably get rejected again. What do I do? Think about how I’m going to pay the rent when my unemployment runs out. Apply for SNAP. Complain about the app that you use to apply for SNAP. What do I do? I write my little newsletter and think “wouldn’t it be nice if someone, unprompted, offered me a very nice deal to publish a bunch of unedited recipe headnotes?”
This is a salad recipe that I worked on this summer. Noah was on a chemo drug that is not great for your heart so we started thinking more about like, antioxidants and shit. Health, etc. This is a pretty good salad. Take out what you don’t like, keep what you do. The tahini was inspired by my friend coming for dinner and bringing a different salad with a tahini dressing. I noticed everyone adding more of the tahini dressing on top of the original dressing (it wasn’t enough for the amount of salad… oops.) and so this time it has added tahini. It adds a richness that is really nice, especially with raddicchio which is quite bitter and loves fat. Now you might ask as one of my friends did “is this a nicoise?” which, no, it’s not. It’s just a salad with a lot of the same ingredients, that’s different, because when I was making it I forgot that nicoise was a thing. Hope that clears things up.
White bean (and tuna) salad with pesto
Serves 6? 7? if you have it with something else (bread, a different salad that a friend brought, etc)
Dressing
Zest and juice of one lemon (maybe juice of 1.5 lemons)
1/2 cup or so of pesto (I gave up on making it ages ago and get it from Caputo’s, the Italian grocery nearby, theirs is the best)
1.5 tbs olive oil
2 tsp dijon
1.5 tsp (or more! probably more!) gochugaru, or harissa (a mix of both is good also)
salt (big pinch at the least) and pepper to taste
3 tbs tahini (weird but go with it)
sprinkle of MSG (okay maybe several sprinkles)
bit of water as necessary to thin (I wound up using nearly 1/3 cup)
Salad itself
a certain amount of baby potatoes (how much is really up to you, I don’t go crazy with them it’s not a potato salad, just a salad with potatoes)
a certain amount of green beans (listen I am not your boss, you don’t have to)
1 head of radicchio (biggish if you can find it)
half-to-whole small plastic container of arugula
1 can of cannellini beans (rinsed and hung out to dry, you can add more if you like, I find the perfect amount to be 1.5 cans of beans if I am making a salad of this volume, but I can’t in good conscience as you to do that)
1 or 2 cans tuna (leave it out if you want, or use a few soft boiled eggs instead)
Boil potatoes in well-salted water. I get the ones in a little bag that say “boils in 15 minutes” and I have always found that to be accurate. While they cook trim and rinse your green beans. Scoop potatoes out of the water with a spider and cook green beans for two minutes. (Or if you’re feeling confident (which I never am about potatoes) add them when there’s two minutes left of potato cook time)
Rinse with cold water and set aside to cool completely. You can do this in the afternoon and stick them in the refrigerator for later if you want.
When you’re ready to eat:
If you haven’t already, rinse and drip dry your beans.
Make dressing. Do it. See if it wants more pesto, maybe it does. I sometimes (always) add a bit of MSG at the end. I put mine in a jam jar and shook it to combine. It needed water to thin it out, but otherwise was very good.
Cut potatoes in half, trim green beans into bite sized pieces if you didn’t already. Put into the bottom of a large bowl. Toss these with a little bit of the dressing.
Chop raddichio: I cut it in half, take out the core and then cut into little rectangles. Put that in the bowl. Add the arugula. Toss with more dressing.
Dump beans onto salad. Add tuna onto beans which are on salad. Pour more dressing on top. And you have done it, dinner.
NB: this is still tasty for at least one day after you make it. Can’t vouch for two.