Get ready to fall in love with a new ingredient: halloumi cheese.
Everybody loves cheese, right? But it’s something you put on top of other food for fun. Its not the featured item of your dinner plate – until now.
Meet halloumi cheese – a mixture of goat’s and sheep’s milk, semi-firm, salty goodness.
Halloumi is famous for being a cheese you can grill. It has a very high melting point so you can literally treat it like a piece of chicken.
Most recipes using halloumi are simply that – a grilled piece of cheese served as an appetizer.
A lot of the recipes online show it being breaded and then fried (idea for your air fryer if you are playing with that).
My Seared Halloumi Salad with Cumin-Lime Chickpeas, Mint and Pistachios puts the cheese front and center with a supporting side. This is an adaption of a recipe I found in an issue of Food To Love: Flexible Plant-Based Recipes that I picked up at the checkout of Whole Foods. (Great issue, click link to buy it online or Google to buy the digital version even cheaper – sadly it appears the magazine isn’t producing anymore issues.)
Halloumi has a satisfying, salty bite which would be too much on its own so I paired with fresh greens, good olive oil, fresh mint, a little kick from serrano peppers and the crunch of freshly shelled pistachios to balance it out. The cumin-lime chickpeas add tanginess as well as additional healthy protein.
Best part? This impressive dinner salad comes together in about 15 minutes.
Ingredients
Cumin-Lime Chickpeas
- 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp lime juice
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- salt and pepper
- 1/2 serrano pepper, seeded and diced
- 1/2 shallot, thinly sliced
- 1/2 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
- 10 cherry tomatoes, halved
Halloumi Salad
- 2 cups mixed greens (I use arugula and kale)
- 1 avocado, sliced
- 4-6 slices halloumi cheese (1/4 inch thick)
- cooking spray
- 1/4 cup fresh shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
- 1/4 cup fresh mint leaves, roughly chopped
- extra virgin olive oil to finish
Instructions
Make the cumin-lime chickpeas
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lime juice and cumin. Season well with salt and pepper. Add the diced serrano (throw in a few seeds for extra heat), the chickpeas and the halved cherry tomatoes. Stir to combine and set aside to marinate while you prepare the halloumi salad.
Assemble the salald
- Heat a cast iron grill pan over med-high heat. Make sure it is nice and hot. Spray generously with cooking spray. Add the halloumi slices and sear for about 2.5 minutes per side or until you have nice grill marks.
- Meanwhile, divide the greens between two large salad bowls. Divide the avocado slices between each bowl. Place the chickpeas in the middle, dividing between the two bowls.
- Place half of the halloumi on top of chickpeas. Sprinkle with mint and pistachios. Finish with a drizzle of olive oil.
