Salad Days

I have never been a huge fan of salads and barely if ever made one till recently. Somehow the mood took me to take one to a barbecue, but I made it to my own liking, informed somewhat by my food wheel notion.

The number one thing I did was to reject lettuce as an ingredient. What a banal and tiresome thing lettuce is. The base of my salad was one or both of baby roquette and spinach. Roquette in particular is a far more tasty and interesting leaf.

Next I added some slivers of red capsicum. I also considered adding similarly sliced onion but a few friends are sensitive to that flavour-enhancing bulb, so I spared them. That was all I included of more traditional salad vegetables but I added other and more novel forms of plant matter.

I threw in generous helpings of both pine nuts and corn kernels (minus the tinned brine they tend to come in). I discovered that too generous a helping of these results in them gathering at the bottom but a bit of salad tossing fixed that. These are both things that salad skeptics like me may favour for both texture and taste. But there was more.

I had wanted to find some marinated sliced mushrooms at the deli and throw them in. My thinking was that the marinade would serve as my salad dressing. It seems however that such a product is rare and so I settled for marinated eggplant. This worked rather well but on another occasion I had more time to spare and so got both mushrooms and some balsamic dressing and did it myself.

Already my salad has interesting ingredients and a flesh-like 'star' of the dish. And as described so far it is vegan. However my original version was merely vegetarian because I had added in some baby bocconcini (once more minus the water it is packaged in). The cheese instantly pushed the marinated fleshy thing aside as the protagonist of this dramatic concoction.

Oddly, I was the only one to bring salad to two separate parties, and in both cases it was welcome by those present, and complemented other foods well. However, I like to think it serves as a bit of a meal in itself, due to its eclectic mix of ingredients, which for convenience I will list here:

Core Ingredients

Baby Roquette, Pine Nuts, Corn Kernals, Mushrooms, Balsamic Dressing.

Optional or Substitute Ingredients

Baby Spinach, Red Capsicum, Onion, Marinated Eggplant, Baby Bocconcini.