onmyplate | No Comments | March 22nd, 2010
I don’t hate salads, but I never seem to eat them. I rarely want to order them in a restaurant, and I not only dislike the kinds of home made salads always presented at potlucks, but I find my own salad materials rotting in the crisper every time I think I’ll get around to making one. I guess I’m just not a salad person, or so I thought.
I ate a scary large salad for lunch and enjoyed it, and a few days ago I ate another. I bought salad materials at the store today on purpose. Have I gone mad? No, I’ve simply found my salad stride. What changed? What led me from the dark side eschewing salad to feasting on the stuff? I realised a few things about my own tastes and began to experiment until I found out what exactly about salads I deplored and quickly excised them from my salad bowl.
First of all, I wasn’t doing math right in my head. As someone who doesn’t calorie count, like most people, I judge my food by quantity on my plate. This is all fine and dandy, but there’s a big difference between half a cup of rice or your sandwich bread and half a cup of spinach in terms of raw calories. If you’re going to eat a salad for a meal, you have to make it bigger than you expect. Double my salad quantity and I’m significantly more satisfied.
It seems logical then that a rib-sticking salad should include some form of protein to keep you from getting the grumblies a few hours later, but I realised that I do not enjoy protein in my salad. I don’t like beans, I don’t enjoy tofu, I hate fish, and I generally don’t even like cheese amid my leafy greens. Of course I like all of these things separately just fine, but put them in a salad and I start to turn up my nose. So guess what, I stopped trying to make sure I had protein in my salads and they started to look many times tastier. I’m happy to eat the protein, say a bit of peanut butter on an apple or a side of lentils or even leftover salmon but I immediately get disgusted if it’s put atop my salads.
Perhaps protein’s presence in my salad is overwhelming. On my path to salad bliss I’ve discovered that my least favourite salad of all time is the “hodgepodge” of anything and everything. I like vegetables. Not just most vegetables, I like all of them: the ugly green ones, the bitter ones that require extra cooking, the ones that stain your fingers and kitchen knives, the stringy ones, the ones masquerading as other foods, the ones toddlers are afraid of, all of them. Yes, even capsicum. I’ll eat the heart out of that, provided there’s nothing else in my icebox. However, I do not enjoy all of vegetables hanging out at town square together. I’ve never liked the cornucopia of roasted vegetables I grew up with. I never enjoyed the jubilee of veggies in a casserole. Only four ingredients allowed in my salad: one green, one onion-ish item, and only two others. Those other two can be whatever: pears and walnuts, grapefruit and avocado, mushrooms and hard boiled egg, so long as your ingredients don’t total over 4. Apparently I like thematic, segregated, minimal vegetables in my salad.
That was it. That’s all it took to get me to eat salads regularly. It wasn’t the ingredients I didn’t like, nor was it the concept of a salad, and I’ll eat just about any dressings around. It was my idea of what a salad was. Now though, I did eat a salad for lunch and let me tell you, it was delicious.




















