Feel Good Crunchy Bean Salad

The gorgeous bean salad you’ll actually love (and look forward to enjoying).

To me, bean salads were always old-fashioned, cop-out, straight-from-the-can processed types of salads that I would never want to touch.

Not this one.

Totally not.

It’s a shame that beans get neglected because they could totally be amazing and so healthy.

This is not a quick prep type of salad. To start, there’s a lot of chopping of fresh veggies. When I make this, I try to do the chopping on Thursday night. But once you have this beauty in your fridge, you’ll be happy and satisfied. It’s a l’kavod Shabbat type of salad, but it’ll still last all week–great for a filling lunch when you don’t have time to prep anything.

If you don’t want that high-sodium canned-product taste and after-feel, Eden Organic makes Black Beans in a can with no sodium. Beware, though, they also make a product which looks similar called Black Soy Beans and those are totally different and would not work. I bought them by mistake once – don’t make the same mistake! I’m still using canned vs. dried black beans because 1) they’re more accessible 2) unlike lentils, dried black beans will take a long time to cook.

Want to know about this colander spoon? It’s featured in this post.

Lentils cook quickly, so I’m using dried vs. canned.

So pretty.

The dressing is minimal–a splash of vinegar, olive oil, salt, and sugar. Just a bit. I like rice vinegar because it’s neutral and doesn’t have a strong vinegary type of taste, but regular white vinegar is fine too.