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On Food
Join Me in My Dense Bean Salad Journey
The opposite of schadenfreude is glüchschmerz.
About a year ago, I started dreaming about a dish full of things I want to eat: beans (specifically garbanzo beans), hearty roasted vegetables, dressed in olive oil and salt, maybe a little feta. But because I had never seen anyone else eat something like this, or found a recipe for it, I couldn’t let myself do it. It’s no secret I have high-level recipe anxiety: even though I’ve been told I’m a great cook, if there is no recipe for something, I can’t do it. It doesn’t matter that a dish like this solves so many problems at once — high protein, high fiber, cheap, low fat, delicious — if it hasn’t been done before, in my twisted mind I’m not allowed to do it.
But a few weeks ago I heard about something going viral on Tik Tok called a “dense bean salad.” I don’t have a Tik Tok account, because it really is a spy tool for the People’s Republic of China. I prefer to be spied on only by American corporations like Meta and Amazon, so whatever this salad was required some googling.
It is, Dear Reader, the salad of my dreams. It is the salad that I had thought of but never let myself make. It is exactly what it sounds like: a bean base, hearty vegetables, a vinaigrette, some cheese. The idea is to make a huge batch which…