Bean Salad

There was a 5 or 6 year period of my life where I was pescatarian only and didn’t eat any chicken or beef. Once my mom started getting sick, dinners at my parents house got complicated. 9/10 times any meal over there would involve some kind of grilled chicken + whatever sides I decided to bring with me.

My mom still wanted to help in the kitchen (it was her domain when she was healthy) and so it all got very intense and hyper focused around successfully getting a meal on the table. It was around this time that I decided to stop adhering to any special dietary restrictions and started eating meat again.

(It should be noted that the original reason that I stopped eating land animals was not due to any sort of health or moral reason. It was because Sherlock has an intense prey drive and when he was a puppy, I bore witness to him killing several animals in our yard – rabbits/rats/etc. Those incidents totally turned me off meat for a good long while).

So now, even though I am no longer pescatarian, I don’t really crave meat. I would much rather eat a vegetable and seafood based diet. Since the weather is getting warmer, I am feeling a lot more inspired to try out the recipes that lean more towards salads/vegetables/etc. Fresh vegetable season is my favorite.

I made this recipe exactly as it was written in the cookbook. I am such a novice in the kitchen that I have limited understanding of how subbing or changing ingredient sizing will mess things up.

As such, I made this salad with the full allotment (3/4 C.) of sugar. This means that in no way, shape or form is this even remotely healthy. Looking back, I could have totally put in ¼ the amount of sugar this recipe called for and it would have tasted the same (or likely better).

This recipe got better the longer that it sat. But, I wound up throwing about half of it away due to all the sugar. This cookbook that I am working from has roughly a dozen bean salad recipes so, while I might make this one again it will be awhile.