Canned Creativity

Mondays. The beginning of the week, an opportunity to start the week off right. It's true! But these days, I'm so darn busy that Monday blurs into Tuesday, then to Thursday, then Friday (and in my case, to Saturday and still working hard). Sigh.

I've been working these past weeks to "clean" out my cabinets of food, as I'm moving out of the city back home to start on a new adventure in food. So far, so good! But, I've had a major surplus of canned tomatoes and am definitely sick of tomatoes - tomato sauce, tomato soup, more tomato sauce. Luckily, there was some other "random stuff" in there - lentils, brown rice, a can of black beans...wait! Eureka! Spacing out on the subway home, I had an idea!

My friend The Lunchbelle had brought some cilantro to my place Saturday when I made dinner. I still had some left over, and was craving a "fresh" spin on dinner, and I thought up just the combination: canned whole tomatoes, chopped up, mixed with my can of black beans (no salt), and a lot of cilantro. The perfect topping? An avocado, so I stopped off at the market on my way home to grab one.

The prep was easy - open cans, smush with a spoon, season liberally with salt to taste (I'm a huge fan of Maldon salt - there is no comparison!). I was utterly famished, so I served my black bean and avocado salad with some cold leftover mac and cheese from Saturday's dinner - a quick and complete dinner in a bowl.

I still have a pint of this salad left over - maybe for lunch later this week? A late dinner? Whenever it's eaten, I hope it's even better than before now that flavors have had time to blend.