Roast Redux Salad

Leftovers can sometimes be a hard sell.  Not many people like eating exactly the same thing for dinner then lunch, then dinner again.  Which can be a problem if you've made, say, a large roast and a LOT is left in the fridge.  For some reason, leftover roast (be it beef, pork or lamb) lingers at our house.  Maybe because no one wants to deal with slicing it once it's cold, maybe because reheated roast tends to get dry, or maybe because it can be just plain boring to eat the same meat-plus-two-veggies for back-to-back meals.

Interestingly, I couldn't persuade anyone to eat the leftovers of the roast I used to make this dish, but my husband took the leftovers of the repurposed leftovers twice for lunch.  This leftover salad is just that good.

This grain-based salad is inspired by a recipe from Julia Child's The Way to Cook for managing leftover lamb roast.  I did make this with thinly sliced leftover leg of lamb, but I think it would be good with beef or pork roast too.  I made it with bulgur as the grain base (per Julia's directions), but rice, quinoa or couscous would be good too...just be sure to cook the grain according to package directions.

Now the tomato and onion roasting is NOT a fast process and you don't really have to do it (Julia didn't, she just put these ingredients in her salad raw).  But it made the winter hothouse tomatoes de-lish-us and roasting takes that sharp, bitey heat out of the onion that you'll get if you leave it raw.

You can do all of this a day in advance, which is precisely what I did (if you roast the veggies, I'd fridge them for 2 or 3 days even, for as long as you fridge your leftover roast).  I got to walk in the door after work to a fully prepared meal.  And THAT, in addition to how good it tasted, is the real beauty of this meal.

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The BEST vegetarian chili

Pictured with biscuits

I'm no stranger to vegetarian cooking.  I routinely incorporate vegetarian and vegan meals into our dinner rotations...in fact, one of my kids will only reliably eat vegetables when accompanied by tofu (or hidden in a smoothie, in which I have also used tofu).  I have a long-standing history of sneaking vegetarian proteins into meals without telling my soy-phobic audience (bad Daughter-In-Law, bad!)  I have happily tried cooking with nearly every meat substitute and vegetarian protein readily available at my grocery store, everything from tofu and tempeh to Fakin' and Garden Burgers and (oddest of all IMHO) Texturized Vegetable Protein.

But I do not like vegetarian chili.

I have tried many a recipe...the ones that use frozen-then-thawed shredded tofu as a meat substitute, the ones that use TVP, the ones that refuse to even try to sub anything in for the meat and go all-out with beans and vegetables.  They all lack something, well, *meaty*.  The texture, the depth of flavor, the way the tomatoes and spices of the chili play together...it just doesn't quite work as well without meat.

And then I saw the recent Cook's Illustrated issue (December 2012).  I adore Cook's Illustrated.  Geeky and science-y and culinarily outstanding all at once.  They have dedicated most of a 2-page spread to explaining why their newly developed Best Vegetarian Chili Recipe Ever works, but the important part is...it does work.  It makes the thing that meat does to chili happen but without the meat.  It also makes a vat of chili, which naturally makes it an ideal make-ahead sort of affair.

It's a good thing it makes so much (and that you can freeze some for another day) because, like everything Cook's Illustrated does, there are a lot of little steps that lead you to the perfection they offer.  Aggravating, but absolutely necessary.  The one step you could probably skip is toasted and grinding your own dry chile pods.  In fact, they suggest substituting 1/4 cup ancho chile powder for the at-home roasted-ground chiles if you don't want to do that step.  But everything else...grinding dry shiitake mushrooms, toasting and grinding walnuts, cooking a blend of dried beans from scratch...necessary.

They recommend a mixture of earthy beans (pintos, kidney, black beans) and creamy beans (navy, great northern).  I used navy and pintos in equal parts.  I also used 2 pasilla peppers and 2 sandia peppers (instead of ancho and New Mexico) because those are the dry peppers I have in my pantry, but next time I'll just use chile powder.

CI recommends cooking the chili in the oven to avoid having to stir the beans.  I think it just makes it take longer and produces a thinner chili than I like, so I'll be doing it on the stovetop from now on.

The recipe below is rewritten to streamline the steps and make the ingredient list make more sense to me LOL  I *hate* it when the ingredients are listed in a different order than you use them, so I've regrouped them into clusters that get added/handled all at once.  I also think this makes a LOT more than the 6-8 servings CI suggests, hence the range of servings.

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