Freeform Forum: Salads.

I’m watching what I’m eating and working out in order to get ready for a trip to Ireland. I’m using LoseIt.com to help me monitor what I eat and improve my eating habits. Since it’s summer, I hate cooking, so I usually do a lot of salads since vegetables are plentiful.

A fresh summer salad

I’m bringing this all up because I have a peculiar rule of thumb for making a salad.  Loosely said, I won’t eat a salad unless it has three ingredients.  That’s how I define a salad compared to Merriam -Webster’s definition:

Any of various usually cold dishes: as a: raw greens (as lettuce) often combined with other vegetables and toppings and served especially with dressing b: small pieces of food (as pasta, meat, fruit, or vegetables) usually mixed with a dressing (as mayonnaise) or set in gelatin.

However, I’m specific.  Three different greens (say romaine, arugula and spinach) mixed together, does not a salad make.  Forgetting the whole genre of salads mixed with a dressing or set in gelatin, I wondered what the standard for a salad is.  I went to my trusty web-resource, Wikipedia, and looked up salad.  Wow!

A green salad with crunchy onions and carrots

According to the Wikipedia article on salad, a salad can be served at any time in a meal as an appetizer, a side salad, a main course salad, a palate-cleansing salad or a dessert salad. I had never thought of a palate-cleansing salad before, but, then maybe that’s the “European” thing.  You know, when you have a salad after an entrée and you say, “That it’s the way they do it in Europe,” to save face from forgetting that you made a salad to have at the beginning of dinner.

Then there are the types of salad: green, vegetable, bound, main course, fruit and dessert.  Green, vegetable and fruit are pretty obvious – named for their components.  A Main course salad is usually greens plus a protein.  This is one of my favorite go to meals.  Nothing as simple and healthful as adding a good serving of protein to a salad.  Love many different options, like nuts, cheese, tuna, leftover chicken or leftover steak.  Sometimes on a weight-training day, I'll add two (steak and blue cheese, chicken and almonds, cheddar and sunflower seeds) to increase my protein.

Then there were the two that I didn't really consider.  It took me a while to get bound, but they are like macaroni, pasta and potato salads, bound by mayonnaise, for example.  The dessert salads, I never thought of them.

A good old-fashioned Midwestern Cookie Salad

There’s a whole world of dessert salad – out there to blow everyone’s good eating habits.  Per Wikipedia, “dessert salads rarely include leafy greens and are often sweet. Common variants are made with gelatin or whipped cream (oftentimes with the brand products Jell-O and / or Cool Whip.)” I thought that it was a little cheeky of the writer to tell me that dessert salads are often sweet. 

According to the article the Midwest has the lion’s share of dessert salads, including jello salad, pistachio salad, ambrosia, snickers salad, glorified rice and cookie salad. I looked them all up and they seem more like no-bake puddings than salads, but many folks would consider them as such.  I just call them rich.

A colorful and healthful salad.

At the end of my culinary investigation when I think of a salad, I think of a mixture of at least three different vegetables and/or fruit, where a combination of greens is considered as only one of the components. If I want to make it an entree, then I add a good serving ot two of protein. Boring, maybe, but the research was fun.  In the long term, this oddball peculiarity for me works out, since I end up eating three of my suggested five to seven daily servings of fruits and vegetables in one sitting.

Images courtesy of nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, Piyachok Thawornmat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, Wikipedia and scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, respectively.