What’s Your Favorite Salad?
Hello and welcome back toWhat’s Cooking? , a weekly open thread where you can share all your brilliant thoughts, tips, recipes and opinions on anything edible. This week I want to talk about the sometimes ridiculed but often delicious plate of complementary flavors and textures: salad.
They say you can’t make friends with salad, but I enjoyed some salads which made me feel very friendly. The beauty of a salad is that it is just the way you want it to be, whether it’s a pile of greens, a bowl of grains, or even pasta or potatoes drenched in mayonnaise. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a salad a salad, but I know it when I see it. (The fact that I’m from Mississippi doesn’t help, since we make salads with Cool Whip.) But I don’t want to get caught up in the semantics of the salad – I want to hear how you make your taste awesome. Here are some fresh questions that might raise you:
- What’s your favorite greens salad? Do you like the delicate green color, the classic crunchy romaine, or the super strong leaf like kale?
- Is there room for an iceberg in your salad bowl? My initial impulse was to say no, but then I remember the iconic wedge salad and have to reconsider my opinion. I understand that salad wedge is just a remedy for blue cheese and bacon, but that’s fine with me.
- What’s your favorite cereal or legume salad? I’m a big fan of lentil salads – ready-made you can buy at TJ’s to get the most out of your lentils – with a little olive oil, red wine vinegar, feta cheese, red onions, and parsley.
- Do you prefer cooked or sliced salad? I love the way the compound salads look, but the chopped salad brings all the flavors together into one perfect bite, which in my opinion is the basis of the salad.
- How do we feel about fruit salad? I’m not a fan of iterating with lots of yogurt, but fresh seasonal fruit with added sugar, lemon zest, and fresh mint can be excellent.
- What’s the weird regional dish in your city or state called salad? As I mentioned earlier, the Mississippi is very fond of playing fast and loose with the word, offering us delicacies such as the famoussalad 7Up and saladof pears .
- What’s your favorite store-bought dressing? I used to really like something called Cheese Fantastico, but I haven’t heard that name in years.
- Do you refuel yourself? I don’t have an exact ratio that I follow, but usually I just drop a bunch of something (olive oil, lemon, honey, cooked mustard, garlic powder) into a jug and shake to emulsify.
- How do you season chicken, tuna or pasta salads? My secret ingredient for all of this is brine brine, which adds acid, salt and all kinds of spices.
As usual, feel free to talk about any salad you feel compelled to mention, even if I didn’t ask you above.