Salad requests

[mousme]

Dear flist,

I am on a salad kick. It's part of my new healthy-eating thing. My problem, such as it is, is thus: I am not an experienced salad person. My salads are therefore pretty standard: lettuce, raddichio, cucumber, tomatoes, and peppers. Occasionally avocado. Today I went wild and added red cabbage. Sometimes I remember to put in spinach, but I usually forget.

So I want to broaden my horizons. What delicious salads do you make? I am open to suggestions, although I reserve the right to ignore ingredients I don't like (endives, for instance: blick).

Ideally, the salads would be non-creamy in nature (in terms of the dressing), and not too heavy on the protein (nuts, chicken, whatever), but I am not averse to having that sort of salad listed as well, for the occasional change of pace.

Ideas?

Comments

[dizietsma.livejournal.com]

Carrots sliced or shredded, broccoli, beansprouts, pasta, raisins, grapes, blue cheese (although that might bust your creamy quota), olives...

[zercool.livejournal.com]

A tablespoon or two of crumbled feta cheese goes a long way.

A little grilled chicken or sliced ham/turkey is great.

[rowen26.livejournal.com]

Mandarin slices and raisins always add a level of exotic to my salads.

[mieszko.livejournal.com]

A person to eat the salad off of always makes it better.

[ai731.livejournal.com]

Three-bean Salad Plus

It's fast, easy, and filling:

1 tin cut green or yellow beans (or fresh, steamed)
1 tin red kidney or black beans
1 tin chick peas
1 tin corn niblets
fresh bean sprouts

Drain & rinse tins of beans and mix everything together in your biggest bowl.
Dress with olive oil & balsamic vinegar dressing & black pepper.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Mushrooms, blue cheese, red-wine vinegar dressing. Green pepper, scallions, carrots optional.

[sparrowinsky.livejournal.com]

I don't eat salads often, and one of my favorites is basically piling everything in the fridge onto lettuce, but here's one that might work for you:

Wild/mixed greens (or romaine, or whatever-- I tend to go with dark greens, but I just like 'em), spinach, 1/4 or 1/2 a red onion, finely diced, one or two tomatoes, diced, mushrooms, chickpeas. I usually make a vinaigrette, either balsamic or honey-apple. Sometimes I'll squeeze a lemon onto it, or toss some bacon bits on. It's actually not bad with a few spoonfuls of cottage cheese, either.

Fairly simple, but it's nice and light for summertime eating :)

[sultrysong.livejournal.com]

The first thing you must do is banish iceberg lettuce. Try romaine, or arugula, or any of the thousand other types. They have flavour and texture and yummy goodness. We haven't had iceberg in our house since ... well, since we got the lizard two years ago. I mean, he only eats romaine, why should we dine on the tasteless stuff?

Okay, so we've determined I'm a lettuce snob. I've got my lettuce freak on. I'll leave the rest to my wife (who will probably tell you to add capers to salad).

Oh, and I'm so glad you got mileage out of The Boy's jokes!

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Iceberg forsooth!

No, I use all sorts of different kinds, although I favour Romaine and Frisée.

I am sadly not a huge fan of capers. :(

[luvenditti.livejournal.com]

hear hear! Romaine is my favourite! ... and spinach. ... and Boston ... and mixed baby greens ...

... alright, so I can eat lettuce like an apple, what of it?!

[sultrysong.livejournal.com]

I also think I deserve lots of praise for not saying: "Salad's what food eats."

Oh, damn. I said it.

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee!

"Admire my restraint!"

[le-maistre-e.livejournal.com]

Mache is great in a salad. Also that European blend you can buy in the same place as the mache (see, there's one of those chapeau accents on the "a" in that, but, try as I might, just can't seem to find it on this keyboard). Our favorite dressing is balsamic reduction. Expensive, but well, WELL worth it. Also known as balsamic glaze, sometimes. Re nuts: I'm a fan of sunflower seeds with my salads. Also, we should sit down and talk about this or go grocery shopping together.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

julienned green pepper
shaved red cabbage
shaved red onion, break up the "rings'
thinly sliced celery
chopped cauliflower or broccoli
thinly sliced carrot

Make a whole bunch. Toss with vinaigrette. Take some and toss with leafy greens. Save the rest for the rest of the week. For the rest of the week, just add leafy greens. Leafy greens go weird when soaking in vinaigrette, but the stuff in the list doesn't.

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

My favourite salad could barely be called a salad. It's just sliced tomato and sliced cucumber on a plate, with some vinegar and (fresh, ideally) basil. Maybe add some ground black pepper if you're feeling fancy. It does have the notable benefit of being brain-numbingly easy, though it's more of a summer thing, as neither the tomatoes nor the cucumbers are at their best in the winter.

[dizietsma.livejournal.com]

Swap the cucumber for mozarella (proper mozarella, in a bag of liquid not dry like cheddar) and you have tomato caprese, yummy :)

[pasley.livejournal.com]

You can take most ordinary salads and add any or many of the following, and they become really tasty:
-cheese: feta, blue, oka, brie (heated to melty in microwave), even plain old old cheddar
-raisins
-croutons made from sourdough bread, or pumpernickel is good, too
-red onion, thinly sliced and sauteed in olive oil
-fruit like apples, pears, oranges (mandarin especially good) avocados

[luvenditti.livejournal.com]

yes to the avocado, I also highly recommend corn salad / chutney

one can niblets corn
one pepper (red or orange if you can manage)
a bit of shallots or onion very finely chopped
cuccumber
baby toms

favourite dressing


... we should have a salad party!

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

Everyone's mentioned stuff I'd have suggested, except for... Jicama! Seriously. We replace half the cabbage in a coleslaw with grated jicama, and om nom nom. It's kind of like cabbage crossed with an apple.

Toasted nuts/and or seeds make any salad awesome. I make my own croutons by tossing homemade bread with melted butter and herbs/garlic, then toasting them in the oven. (I also use them in roast bird stuffings -- mmmm.) Grated carrots add a nice sweetness.

Squeaky cheese? Why have I never added squeaky cheese to a salad? Oh wait -- because I *eat it* before it could be considered as salad stuff.

[karine.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of adding some fruit to salad, for the sweetness that counterbalances the savoury. For example, diced mango goes surprisingly well in a dark green salad with a balsamic vinaigrette, and there's that baby spinach, strawberry and poppy seed salad that I adore. Mandarins in a chicken breast salad, yum. Chopping some granny-smiths into a salad with mayonnaise-type dressing gives it some welcome tang. How about some seedless grapes on a salad that has crumbled cheese and a red-wine vinegar dressing?

Same with fruit vinaigrettes, like honey-pear or lemon-poppy seed, will make for a sweet salad instead of savoury.

[moonandtree.livejournal.com]

I make the best vinegrette in the history of vinegrettes. Is that the right spelling?

You have to come over, though, to get a sample and the recette (I know how to spell that one)

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

My favourite salad is a companion to fried mushroom sandwiches, and makes enough use of sandwich remnants that I can't post the salad recipe alone, so here goes:

Start soaking some spinach in a salad bowl

Juice a pair of full-sized oranges (like navel or valencia) into a bowl with a lid. Pour in a little olive oil and a little soy sauce. Chop (finely) a pair of shallots and 2-3 cloves of garlic, and add. Sprinkle in some thyme.

Pull the stems off of some (4-6) portobello mushrooms, dice them (~1cm pieces) and set them aside.

Lightly oil a frying pan or grill on medium heat.

One at a time, take a mushroom cap, place it in the bowl, close the lid, and shake it. Take it out, and place it on the pan/grill gills up.

While the mushrooms are cooking, slice one bagel for each mushroom cap and begin toasting them. Take the spinach out of the salad bowl. Rinse and dry both the bowl and the spinach, and then put the spinach back in the bowl. Pour the diced stems into the bowl with the left-over marinade, and fill the bowl the rest of the way with cashews. Slice one bagel for each mushroom cap, and toast them.

At some point during this process the mushroom caps will be cooked well enough on the smooth side that they'll be ready for flipping; do that.

Once this is done, (optionally) flip the mushrooms back over to gills-up, and place sliced (old) cheddar on them, letting the mushrooms continue to fry until the cheddar is melted.

Once the mushrooms are done frying, take them from the grill/pan and put them on the bagels. Note that jerk sauce makes a good condiment for these sandwiches.

Take the stem/cashew/marinade mixture, and fry it until the cashews start to brown. Add it to the salad bowl along with some raisins or dried cranberries, toss it all together. Since there will still be some marinade from the mushrooms/cashews mixing in the the salad, a dressing is not strictly necessary (but if you feel it to be underdressed, a fruity dressing, like a rasbperry vinaigrette goes well IME).

I got the recipe for the mushroom sandwiches from an old bike messenger, with the note that since the marinade isn't used on raw meat, it can still double as a salad dressing afterwards. Figuring that spinach salads lend themselves well to nuts (and that the meal needs a protein source), I worked out the salad component over a few months of tweaking (cooking the nut/stem/marinade arose because the strength of the remaining garlic and shallot struck me as overpowering the nuts and dried fruit; your tastes may vary).

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

Other common salad ingredients (owing to their growing-in-mirandaaskew's-garden-ness) around here: mustard greens, dandelion greens, zucchini.