Dukkah and cover

My mom keeps insisting that, and this is a direct quote, "[I] live like a monk." This is something I don't understand. My apartment is hardly a cell (minus its quasimonochambered nature), I'm married, I regularly take in sinful amounts of Diet Coke and exercise, and I eat rich, indulgent food, like this.

Dukkah is a blend of crushed nuts and spices usually eaten with olive oil-soaked bread. I figured there'd been enough wholesale abuse of large amounts of flour lately, so to use it in more of a main course, I mixed some it with julienned carrots, chopped red onion, shredded kale, chickpeas, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, olive oil, and a little bit of unsweetened coconut. I wish I'd had some raisins or dried apricots to throw in there (well, I have dried apricots, but I'm saving them for baking), because the sweetness would have helped.

Hand-grinding a cup of nuts: oddly satisfying.

There are a bunch of varieties of the spice blend; I used toasted hazelnuts and almonds, sesame seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, dried mint, black pepper, and red pepper.