Charlie Bird’s Farro Salad

Click the link below to go straight to the recipe at NYT. Or click here to go to the recipe courtesy of the Food Network. This recipe is a 4 out of 5 on the difficulty/time consumption scale for a salad because of the Farro cooking situation. Thanks to reader comments over at the NYT I discovered the hack of using Trader Joe’s quick cook Farro–I highly recommend this route if you can take it.

Have you been to Charlie Bird? It’s a great restaurant in New York City. We went years ago when it first showed up on the scene. We felt super cool and well cared for at this place. I highly recommend checking it out. The food is great, the scene is great, the music is awesome–overall cool kid vibes.

So I was all set to make this yesterday and I quickly realized I did not have all the ingredients I needed. I felt I could move forward when I didn’t have quite enough apple cider vinegar, I was going to forge ahead with lime instead of lemon, but when I didn’t have any radish I decided to change course. I did however already have the farro boiling in a mix of water and what apple cider vinegar I had on hand; so…I boiled the farro (a bonus of using the Trader Joe’s 10min Farro) and set it aside in the fridge for the following day.

This is not the quickest of salad recipes but it delivers and is an epic picnic salad–hello summer! The first time I made this recipe it took me an hour. The second time I made it I did so over the course of two days and it felt way more chill. So I suggest making the farro one day ahead.

We just took this salad with us to an outdoor screening of “Dazed and Confused” with a lovely bottle of rose. I laughed at how not “on theme” the picnic was but I’m an adult now and this is what I wanted.