I don't like salad meals but it's hot, hot, hot.
"A salad is not a meal, it is a style." Fran Lebowitz
Melbourne is sweltering today in almost 40 degree heat and so I have been banned from cooking anything for dinner. It heats up the kitchen, I'm told, if I cook. Now I was going to do just a quick stir-fry but it seems I now have to do salad.
Which doesn't really please me. I'm not a salad fan. Well no I need to qualify that. I love my green salad eaten after my main dish, most days. Just lettuce with a vinaigrette that I learnt to make in France more years ago than I care to remember. It cleanses the palate. And I am also rather partial to potato salad - particularly the version I make that includes egg and bacon, parsley and onion, with a vinaigrette dressing not mayonnaise. But that's an accompaniment, not a meal - well lunch maybe, but not dinner.
Perhaps my absolute favourite salad is Delia's Pesto Rice Salad, but much as I love it, it's also not really a main meal - more of a vegetable dish to go with your main meal. Your carbohydrates in fact. I do heartily recommend it - very, very easy to make - you just need some pesto and lemons. It's a taste sensation.
But salad as a main dish is not really my thing. Because it never feels like real food to me. Just a mixture of things that take an awful long time to chomp though.
"One of the benefits of eating salad is that you can eat tons of it and never be satisfied."
Jim Gaffigan
It's rabbit food really isn't it? And yes I know it's really, really healthy - well sometimes I actually wonder - cheese, fatty processed meats like ham and chorizo sausage, oodles of oil and possibly lots of carbs - yes even quinoa is carbs surely? So I'm actually not absolutely convinced of the health benefits. But hey - it's summer - it's hot and there is a fair bit of truth in the argument about not heating the kitchen by cooking something. And a barbecue is definitely not the thing to do on a day like this. Eltham might go up in flames because of it - well the gas barbecue would be OK I suppose. So salad it will be. But what shall I put in it?
Salad has come a long way from the salads of my youth - well at least in the anglo world. We are told that the Europeans were eating wonderful salads all the time - and they probably were. They certainly knew how to do green salad. At home in my childhood, lettuce - always cos I seem to remember - was served with vinegar (malt) and a sprinkling of sugar - or even worse with salad cream. Ugh!
It came in a bottle and I think is basically egg yolks and vinegar. It's not mayonnaise. I never liked it even then but I gather the English still do. Described as 'one of the major culinary disasters of this country' by the wonderful Elizabeth David in her best school marmy tone:
"salad cream was the first product developed by Heinz specifically for the UK market and took eight years to perfect, finally appearing in grocers' shops in 1914."
I gather its heyday was after the war when we ate all sorts of rubbish things. Gradually Elizabeth David et al. and package holidays in Europe changed the English taste. So much so that in 1999 Heinz considered taking it off the market. But there was an outcry and so they have continued with it and are in the process of tarting it up - there is now a lemon and cracked pepper version. I think you can get it here too.
Other salad things were basically just eaten raw - which has its own charm if the produce is good - tomatoes fresh from the garden, cucumber and radish - these were the main things we had in salad. With cold meat which was never very tasty and was pretty dry. Not much else. Simplicity is a mantra quoted even by Elizabeth David but you can overdo it. Nowadays there really is no limit to what you can put in a salad. And above all you must make it look good for:
"Every salad you serve is a picture you have painted, a sculpture you have modeled, a drama you have created.” Carol Truax, The art of salad making
So I checked out my library and the net for some ideas and some pictures for this post and found some really beautiful looking salads.
Click on the images to get the full picture. Yes, some of them are side salads, but some are meant to be main dishes I think. The most beautiful came from the queen of style - Donna Hay - and this one below is the ultimate don't you think?
Radish and ginger it is - to accompany tempura prawns. I actually don't like ginger much either, but I can imagine that it might actually taste quite good as an accompaniment.
Coles is a bit more homely. But homely today is also a lot classier than the salads of my youth. I just opened their latest magazine at random today and this is what came up:
Even here we have classy cheese - feta - classy ham - prosciutto and nectarines with rocket I think and probably pine nuts or something like that too. It's a very typical Australian salad. God knows what the revolting looking drink is to go with it.
So what am I going to do? Well my husband's favourite is a pasta salad with a bought cooked chicken from the supermarket, but I don't want to buy a whole chicken - or even a quarter of one, and besides I would have to cook the pasta. But I do have some leftover rice, and I do have some pesto. So perhaps a variation of Delia's - with some salami, tomatoes, capsicum to bulk it out. And a vinaigrette dressing, perhaps a lemony one - I'm really not very adventurous with salad dressings. I should experiment more.
I just hope it's not still hot tomorrow and I have to do salad again. We have piscatorial friends visiting from interstate tomorrow so it's fish for dinner. But if necessary I guess we could barbecue it and serve it with a salad. Maybe a potato one without the bacon.
"You don't win friends with salad." Homer
Do you think that's the real Homer or Homer Simpson? Anyway, whoever said it I'm not really sure if it's true. Depends on whether your friends like salad or not. Lots of people do. And it's very in with the healthy crowd. And it truly is amazing what you can put in them. Just about anything really. Even the leftover baked beans! And nectarines.
