Happy Valentine’s Eve. It’s time to tell you about my situationship.
We’ve been on and off for years. There was a time when I couldn’t get enough of their fresh, edgy nature. Every room they entered grew brighter, so I’d include them wherever I could, bring them up to whoever would listen. And then, one day, I grew, well, bored with their antics. They seemed more cutting than fresh, more bitter than edgy. We grew apart.
But, with time and distance, the hard edges of resentment soften into apathy, and then further still into a nostalgic fondness. So when you finally run into them in the grocery store — and run into them you will — you can recall only the reasons you were obsessed with them in the first place.
So anyway, I’m back with arugula in a big way.
Its peppery leaves add unmistakable verve to simple salads, grain bowls, pastas and so much more. In Melissa Clark’s roasted cauliflower and arugula salad, they mellow ever so gently against a mixture of slightly cooled florets, pickly red onions and golden raisins, and robust capers and cumin seeds. (For a version with just a tad more heft to it, look to Alexa Weibel’s roasted cauliflower salad, with chunks of halloumi and avocado.)
Roasted Cauliflower and Arugula Salad
Arugula is especially lovely when wilted by the warmth of fresh-from-the-pot pasta, but why not pulverize it into something unrecognizable, but no less delicious, like arugula pesto? Yotam Ottolenghi dresses short twirled noodles and cannellini beans in such a zippy sauce, and then showers it all with grated halloumi for an unexpected but delightfully tangy finish.
You can serve the leafy greens in Yasmin Fahr’s spicy tomato pasta with arugula one of two ways: “Add a tangle of it to the bottom of each serving bowl and toss it with the hot pasta to soften and cut the rawness,” she writes, “or pile it on top, drizzle with your nice olive oil and some grated cheese for a salad-and-pasta combination.”
The pile-it-on-top philosophy anchors a handful of popular NYT Cooking recipes. You’ll see it in Yewande Komolafe’s goat cheese and dill Dutch baby, Kay Chun’s tofu with sizzling scallion oil, Ali Slagle’s salad pizza with white beans and Parmesan and Anna Francese Gass’s crispy cauliflower Milanese. And for good reason: A salad on top is just more fun than one on the side.
But perhaps no recipe has championed arugula quite like Alexa’s creamy, spicy tomato beans and greens, which are having a bit of a moment online as “Marry Me Beans,” or simply “The Beans.” Her recipe deftly demonstrates arugula’s ability to cut through richness. As one reader put it, “The arugula salad is critical and works synergistically with the beans.”
Alexa’s beans seem to have also converted some lifelong arugula haters: “My husband, who HATES arugula, is on his second giant helping of the dish raving, ‘I can’t believe that I love this arugula!’” one reader wrote. “Even my arugula-skeptic husband asked for seconds, and that’s saying something,” another declared.
Open-minded? Willing to change? May a love like that always find me.
