Roasted Beet and Farro Salad with Citrus Vinaigrette

After a trip, you’re left with memories and photos. Maybe a souveneir or two (I have a habit of bringing home spoons, go figure) but sometimes a dish, something you ate during your travels, follows you home and simply refuses to be ignored.

In cases like this it’s helpful to have a direct connection, a source where you can request the recipe, politely of course, but some legit begging and pleading (oh-my-god-if-I-don’t-eat-that-again-soon-I-might-die) might very well occur. Then you sit back and hope the chef is generous enough to share their secrets with you, and in turn your readers.

This is one such recipe, from the Grocery Cafe at Deer Valley Resort in Utah. I knew from the second I took a bite that this was a dish I would not soon forget (and let’s be honest—how often can you say that about a SALAD?)

It’s a beautiful thing, really, when ingredients come together in perfect harmony. There’s a reason that word, harmony, is used to describe both music and food: as when you find it, you almost want to stand up and applaud the chef who created such a magnificent symphony.

In my case, I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I just snapped a photo and made a mental note to email the Deer Valley Resort PR team about the dish when I got home.

I’ve had this recipe in my email box for since December, tempting me to no end, the only thing preventing me from making and sharing it sooner was my unfortunate lack of microgreens. They are hard suckers to find, but darn if I was going to make this salad without them (however that’s not to say the salad wouldn’t be perfectly delicious still without them, because it would, I promise!) Microgreens are basically infant greens or herbs, harvested somewhere between the sprout and baby lettuce stages. They have the flavors of their grown counterparts, just milder and less intense. Not to mention they are just plain cute, and can take even the most ordinary dish to fancy new heights. I see them at Whole Foods every few months, and when they do appear they are in short supply. This time I happened to find arugula, which was perfect for this salad, and cilantro (!!!) which I’d never seen in micro-form before and promptly snatched up.

I’ve seen some chefs around town with their own little microgreen patches, and I assume they are not to difficult to grow yourself. I may just have to set up a little microgreen farm in our unused upstairs shower to ensure I have a steady supply at all times.

Seriously, I want to microgreen ALL THE THINGS.

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