Are you kidding, a recipe for a salad?
Just chop up some of your favorite vegetables, put them in a bowl, and Bob's your uncle. Right. This kind of attitude may be the reason why uncle Bob would eat his steak and potatoes, and maybe get a second serving before he'd even look at the green stuff on the edge of his plate. But is it any surprise? Let's be honest: those few pieces of iceberg lettuce with some carrot shavings on it hardly constitutes a salad. For me at least, it falls into the category of garnish. Nothing wrong with that, but a real salad is whole different idea.
Can a Salad be a Main Course?
Not only can it, I'd say it should. A real salad should be delicious enough to chow down with full gusto, filling enough to make up a whole meal, and diverse enough to keep it interesting again and again. With these criteria the salad can become the most diverse dish possible, most certainly the healthiest, and ideally the food that has always something to offer to everyone. The key is the modular recipe, as we'll see in a moment. But before we get there, one more important thing:
Skip the Bowl, it'll only ruin your salad!
Okay, I admit, if you're bringing a salad to a party, the bowl may not be a bad idea. Until the host thanks you, it is set down on a table, and the first person digs in. I'm sure everyone is familiar with what happens next: The top of the bowl gets dominated by the bigger pieces, while the small stuff immediately becomes leftover, hiding in the bottom of the bowl until the rest is eaten up. So sad...! For this reason, when I make a salad for myself or just a handful of people, I put everything individually on plates, as I did here.
Something Leafy – The Basis of a Salad
Leafy greens, such as chard, spinach, romaine, butter lettuce, kale, frisee, or even dandelion greens... in fact anything but iceberg lettuce is a good idea. Green leaves are the essential ingredient in salads. German, Hungarian (and probably a number of other languages) use the same word for lettuce and salad, understandably so. It is the leaves that hold (or fold) all the rest of the tastes and ingredients together, especially if placed under them. So I usually start out with a layer of leaves, as in this case with a lovely looseleaf. The other ingredients can follow in any order.
Something Spicy – To Add Some Taste
You don't want to burn your tongue off, but it is nice to feel some spice on your food. Depending on the individual's taste, this can be anything from benign garlic to habanero peppers. I usually like to add onions, but that may just be the Hungarian in me. Sometimes chiles serranos can be good too, but right now I just spread a handful of chopped onions.
Something Juicy – To Get the Waters Running
Oh, the feeling of water running together in your mouth... If it tastes nice, even better. And why wait for the Pavlov effect, if you could just bite into something juicy? For example a piece of tomato or a slice of cucumber. Or bell pepper. In fact, there are so many juicy things that many times an ingredient will fall into more than one category. And why not? They don't exclude each other.
Something Crunchy – To Get Your Molars Working
Frankly, one of the most enjoyable aspects of eating is chewing something crunchy. While you grind down the harder pieces, the smaller and softer ones get to infuse everything with their taste. So the longer you chew, the better the salad tastes. A great reason to include something like carrots, beets, or even celery stalks. For my salad here I sliced up some radishes for this purpose.
Something Strong – To Feel the Nourishment
By 'strong' I mean proteiny, more than anything. Here we have a number of options, from all types of meat, hard-boiled eggs, or seafood, to vegetarian options such as mushrooms, beans, or avocados. For my salad I picked fresh Mozzarella cheese, but of course any cheese works fine too. Whatever you think goes best with the rest of the salad.
Something Nutty / Fruity – To Cover the Whole Spectrum
Nuts and fruits are not the most usual ingredients to a salad. Still, I think their tastes can add a great deal, even to an already diverse salad. Sometimes I just add some pieces of an apple or a peach, some grapes work well, or to be more exotic, some mango. Almonds, walnuts, or hazelnuts also make delicious ingredients. Today I used pecan nuts and dried cranberries.
Anything else?
At this point my salad is almost done, so I take a look in the fridge to see if I can add something else. I found a piece of orange bell pepper that was begging me not to let it go to the compost, so I cut it up and put it on top of everything else, together with some green olives.
A Dressing - The Coronation of Perfection
No salad is complete without a dressing, the final exaltation of an already superb salad. Once again, everyone has their preference. Some people, myself included, are fans of the oil-vinegar combo. Others prefer something yogurt-like. Or it could be just a few limes squeezed over everything, maybe with some salt and pepper. For my salad I took balsamic vinegar, requested by the Mozzarella, and my “diluted pesto dressing". The latter is olive-oil with basil, parsley, turmeric, spirulina, pecan nuts and garlic.
I believe such a wonderful salad creation is something even Uncle Bob can't say no to.