This is my take on Teri Turner’s Pepper Steak Salad with Creamy Horseradish Dressing, from No Crumbs Left — her skeleton, and then a few years of my own drift: grilled artichoke hearts where she uses hearts of palm, snap peas and celery for crunch, no marinated red onions, and a bowl of lemon-parsley Israeli couscous on the side that I now can’t imagine the salad without.
I first made her version in 2021 and have been quietly editing it ever since, which is really the whole idea of this blog: cook a thing, notice what you’d change, write the change down before you forget it. The dressing proportions have drifted the most — I tried Greek yogurt and whipped cottage cheese versions along the way, and neither was as good as the sour cream original. Some edits are improvements. Some are just edits.
The one non-negotiable is the rest. Slice a steak too early and the salad gets the juices that belonged in the meat. Ten minutes, unhurried, while the couscous finishes — by the time you’re building bowls, everything lands at once.
