Colorful, flavorful, and quick, this no-cook dish can’t miss
This 'meal kit' salad starts with your pantry
Hi folks, and welcome back to Cool Beans! When food stylist Susie Theodorou comes home from a long day of getting grub ready for its closeup, the last thing she wants to do is turn on the stove. But that doesn’t mean she orders in. Instead, she assembles dishes from pantry staples and a few fresh items from the fridge. One recipe that she comes back to On Repeat is a white bean, pickled beet, and radicchio salad. It’s from her new No-Cook Cookbook, a colorful tome full of recipes she calls “meal kits that already exist in most of our kitchens.”
The salad in question is a quick assembly job, and one that varies depending on what she has on hand. The constant: It’s easy on the eyes. “This dish is about the colors,” Theodorou says. “As a food stylist, I always like the visuals of my food: It’s at least half the appetite appeal.”
Why I love it
“It’s very satisfying, but it’s light enough not to make you overly full. If I’m working from home it can be a lunchtime thing. Or if I’ve come home late after a 12-hour work day, it’ll be good for that. I just like to sit down and eat something fresh—and it’s actually more effort to do takeout, in my opinion.”
What I’ve changed
“Sometimes I don’t have radicchio but I will have another lettuce in my fridge, so I’ll use that. I like radicchio, I like the bitterness, but some people are scared of it, and that’s fine. You can do romaine or Little Gem. You don’t have to do what I do. Even if you substitute a green lettuce for the red lettuce, you’ll still have vibrancy there from the beets. And you can also substitute other pulses. You might not like white beans, but you might like chickpeas or black beans.
Check out Susie’s full recipe for this hearty, pantry-based salad.
“I like to finish it up with something crunchy—it adds a finishing touch. Here it’s crispy onions or toasted pumpkin seeds, but it can be the already-fried shallots that come in little canisters, or toasted sesame seeds, or those salad topper mixtures that come in packets.”
What else I’m into right now
Mexican chili crisp. I like to always have some Salsa Seca from Xilli. It’s the Mexican version of chili crisp, and you use it the same way. There are three versions and they’re all amazing. The Salsa Seca has a bunch of different nuts, sesame seeds, and pepitas. It’s a handy thing to have in the fridge to sprinkle on rice cakes topped with avocado, or onto a salad. I use it over and over again. It dresses up all your beans, and I always use it on my avocado toast.
Peas as protein. One thing I always have is frozen peas, and they’re a good source of plant protein, which people may not know. You can defrost them in boiling hot water for 3 minutes and drain, and then you can whiz them with yogurt or mayo to make a dip or spread.
Visionary veggie cookbook. Annie Bell is a food writer, well known in the U.K. She trained as a nutritionist, and she saw the importance of plant-based cooking and wrote some really good plant-based cookbooks that were ahead of their time. There’s one from 2020 called Plant Power; her ideas are amazing in this book. She did almost a whole chapter on peas!
Correction 10/14/24: A prior version of this story mis-identified Annie Bell’s cookbook as Feast of Flavors; the book in question is called Plant Power. We’ve also clarified the cooking instructions for frozen peas.