This salad is packed with healthy fats from a good dose of avocado. Cooked lentils and both fresh and dried cranberries are tossed with a lemon dijon dressing to make this a hearty lunch or side salad.

I have been crazy obsessed with parsley lately.

Is that weird? I feel like it is.

Of all the herbs out there, I picked the most boring one to go and get obsessed with.

I was explaining my recent lunch obsession of tuna, greek yogurt, mustard, celery and parsley on piece of toasted cheese bread to Brandy the other day and she’s all “so, basically it’s a tuna melt” and I’m like “well yes, but OMG THE PARSLEY, it totally makes the sandwich”.

Who says that? Who gets that excited about freakin’ parsley?

This avocado lentil cranberry salad is a hearty lunch or side salad.

So all I wanted out of this salad was the opportunity to use a ton of parsley and be happy.

The result though is a bit better than that. Parsley + lemon dijon dressing might’ve been a bit weird anyway.

I bought those giant Florida avocados the other day (someone tell me why I’ve been paying twice as much for Haas when these are cheaper, about 3 times the size and taste exactly the same?) and with two of them sitting on the counter, an avocado intervention needed to happen.

This salad is packed with avocado, cooked lentils and both fresh and dried cranberries tossed with a lemon dijon dressing to make this a hearty lunch or side salad.

The intervention includes some lentils (I recommend just slightly under-cooking them, you don’t want them mushy in this), fresh and dried cranberries and of course, my beloved parsley.

This salad is creamy, bright, fresh and oddly hearty at the same time.

So get your parsley pants on and dig in.

You can also replace the lentils in this salad with mung beans.

Just like I use them interchangeably in my mung bean soup recipe, this is another example where that swap would work well.