ISBN 978-0979560606
I like to pack a salad with everything i can pack it with. I think the days of a slice of onion and a cherry tomato are gone–when you dress the salad right. I think the reason why people have drizzled and over dressed the salad for decades now has been because it was little more than a water grassy leaf with a few things added. Salad was more a dish where it was the “thought that counted” more than the actual dish itself. Well–it is time to bring salad forward into the fashionably elite dishes like goulashes and soups that we throw all we can find into it. No one picks up a bowl of soup and pours oils and spices all over it to give it some panache. I have not really used traditional dressings since Susan Powter once again stopped my insanity. I avoided all fats for the 90′s decade and it is still a bit of a social phobia that I have adding oil to my salad. I can now prepare my own dressings and not worry I will wake up in the morning in an over sized straight jacket hissing out my desires for fried dough and ranch dressing. Please note it has taken a decade to evolve past those fears–so I try to be more creative than “fat/no fat” After all the salad is not black and white so why should my choices for it be the same.
This weekend i cooked up some chicken breast with some Mexican spices along with some salsa and wanted to top a bed of romaine with it. I thought–OK my family will want dressing for this salad and I will not. Quandary! So rather than add the normal things I add to a salad, avocado, sliced garlic, cucumbers and fresh cilantro leaves–I blended them up together with a splash of rice vinegar. My 7 yr old kept telling me how much she enjoyed the dressing and how it tasted so good with the cucumbers in it. She will not eat avocado–ever. She loved it in this dressing though!
Another fantastic thing is to create fresh salsa for the salad, take those tomatoes, onions, cilantro and dice them up with some garlic and cumin along with some added bang from a hot pepper. In this salsa I had some pineapple which was about to turn the corner from over ripe to down right bad–I could hear it mumbling terrible things late at night–I knew it was time to cut it up. You could add peaches, green tomatoes–OK you can add anything in the produce section to a salad. So–why bury it under boring ranch dressing each and every time?
Plus–they look better don’t they?
What do you add to your salads?
