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Join Me in My Dense Bean Salad Journey

The opposite of schadenfreude is glüchschmerz.

Adeline Dimond
Sybarite
Published in
5 min readDec 15, 2024

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Image by the author. I screwed this up big-time.

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…

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Sybarite
Sybarite

Published in Sybarite

Sybarite is devoted to stories of pleasure and luxury, and is allergic to all forms of self help.

Adeline Dimond
Adeline Dimond

Written by Adeline Dimond

Federal attorney, writing thought crimes on Medium. To connect: Adeline.Dimond@gmail.com

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