Salad with tahini-sriracha dressing

My Ph.D. thesis defense is in 2 weeks. Needless to say, this is pretty much the only thing occupying my mind these days. I've even been dreaming about my thesis at night. Like literally, dreaming about specific paragraphs in the actual document. Today I told one of my labmates about a recent dream, and he just looked at me for a minute and said "Maybe you need a break. Have you been cooking much lately?" And well, the truthful answer to that is no. Ever since I returned from Singapore & India last week (hopefully I'll be posting some recipes inspired by the trip at some point), I haven't had much time or energy to spare. But my friend is right. I do need to clear my mind. So today, I went for a nice run to take advantage of this ridiculously great weather, and then started thinking about dinner. I was in the mood for a hearty salad and I decided to try creating a new dressing inspired by this recipe on Eat, Live, Run. I started with the flavor profile in that recipe and made a dressing with tahini, white wine vinegar, sriracha, and a bit of yogurt. It was delicious. I used it to dress a nice big salad of spring mix topped with chickpeas, artichokes, hard boiled eggs, and roasted sweet potatoes. Substantial enough for dinner and very healthy - the perfect meal to fuel me up to dive back into that thesis tomorrow!

What are your favorite ingredients for main dish salads?

Salad with tahini-sriracha dressing
This dressing recipe makes enough for about 3 dinner-sized portions. Salad ingredient amounts and proportions can be adjusted to your taste.

Salad greens (I used Olivia's Organics spring mix with herbs, which I love)
Frozen artichoke hearts, thawed
Chickpeas
Hard boiled eggs, chopped
Roasted sweet potato cubes
2 tbs tahini
1 tbs white wine vinegar
1/2 tbs sriracha sauce (or more if you want)
1 tbs extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbs yogurt
3 tbs water

Put salad greens on a plate and top with artichoke hearts, chickpeas, eggs, and sweet potato cubes. In a small bowl, whisk together tahini, vinegar, sriracha, olive oil, yogurt, and water. Drizzle dressing over salad and serve.

Artichokes with sesame dipping sauce

Hi there. Sorry I haven't posted in a while - life has been busy, and there haven't been many blog-worthy meals at my table lately. But spring is here now, which always gets me energized to be more productive, so I'm going to do my best to post more regularly from now on...

Anyway, on to the artichokes! This was my first experience cooking and eating whole artichokes. In the past, I've only had the hearts, either canned or frozen. But I was in the mood to try something new when I was vegetable shopping this week, so I decided to pick up some whole fresh artichokes. I found some really interesting recipes for stuffed artichokes online, but decided that since it was my first time cooking them, I wanted to keep it more simple. I ended up adapting this recipe, which I found on Epicurious. It was great - the artichokes were really fun to eat, and the dipping sauce was delicious. I think the sauce would work nicely as a dip for many other vegetables as well, or maybe even as a sandwich spread.