For some reason, all my Magazine Mondays recipes have been coming from Cooking Light. I'm not sure why that is, since I flag lots of recipes in Bon Appetit and Food & Wine as well, but I'm really glad I stuck with Cooking Light for this one! This recipe is super tasty. The only thing I didn't like in this dish was the lack of heat in the dressing - I ended up adding a little Sriracha sauce to my bowl, which made it perfect.
Although this is called a salad, it really is a balanced main dish. The tofu preparation is rather time-consuming, but it is worth it - I loved the dense, firm texture of the pressed tofu. I made a few changes to this recipe: the original one calls for pearled barley, but I used pearled farro instead. Farro is a grain in the wheat family that I have been wanting to try for a while - my grocery store recently started carrying it, so I took the opportunity to give it a try. It cooks pretty quickly, and I liked it a whole lot in this dish. Wheat berries or brown rice would probably work well too. I also sauteed the beans instead of blanching them, and tweaked the amounts of some of the ingredients based on what I had available.
