Composed salads.

Last night I was putting together salads for dinner, and I reflected on how dinners at my house have gotten more streamlined and simple as the years have gone by and the children have arrived and we have embarked on the homeschooling journey.   I still enjoy cooking complicated dishes from new recipes, but all that has gotten shifted onto the weekends.  I am striving now to make delicious and interesting foods that are straightforward to produce and trivial to reproduce:  the stew that simmers all day, the quickly and perfectly steamed vegetable, the rapidly sauteed and simply-sauced cutlet, the stir-fry with only a few well-balanced ingredients.   Last night, for example, we had meatballs (made and frozen last week out of extra meatloaf mixture) simmered in plain tomato sauce in the slow cooker, spaghetti, broccoli (blanched in the pasta water then sauteed quickly with olive oil and garlic)… and then there was that salad.

The salad is the one exception to my "simplify simplify" trend.  As my meals have gotten less and less time and attention paid to them, the side salads have received more and more individual attention.  It’s attention I enjoy lavishing on them.   I’m not sure why.

Back when I made more complicated dinners, side dish salads (if I made them) were generally a big pile of one kind of lettuce  tossed in a bowl with vinegar and oil, or sometimes a lemon-and-onion dressing I make shaken up in a jar.  Main dish salads were another matter — more complicated — but I still served them all mixed up in a large salad bowl to be dished out at the table. 

But nowadays, my large, beautifully seasoned wood salad bowl gathers dust on the top of the cabinets. I begin by washing up two or three kinds of greens, cutting up carrots, celery, always a cucumber, maybe some purple cabbage, whatever bits and ends of vegetables there are.  Sometimes I grate cheese or cook bacon for crumbles, or find dried fruit or nuts.  I get five bowls:  big ones for Mark and me, a smaller bowl for the seven-year-old, a ramekin for the four-year-old, a plastic bowl for the baby.  And then I make a salad for each one of us.

Big handfuls of greens for the adults.  A medium handful for Oscar, but torn into smaller pieces.  Just a few for the littler kids.  Each of us gets a couple slices of cucumber, except Milo, who gets nearly half of one because it’s one vegetable he loves.  He also gets a few baby carrots.  Onions for Oscar and Mark.  Carrots cut into little matchsticks for the baby.  Extra nuts and bacon for Mark, and definitely hold the olives.  Extra blue cheese for me.  I get vinegar and olive oil on my salad.  Everyone else really  wants bottled dressings, so those go on the table.  And there are the salads, composed for each family member, just exactly what each person would want.

Now there are never second servings of salad when I do it this way, but no one seems to mind.  We’re more likely, too, to eat the salad as a first course and then move on to the rest of the dinner.  The pace is a little slower too.   It’s not surprising, either, that my family eats more salad when they each get one that’s got just what they want in theirs.  But the odd thing is, I really enjoy doing this.   It seems as if it ought to feel too crazy to spend the last five minutes of food prep putting a bit of this in his bowl and a bit of that in her bowl, but it really doesn’t.  It feels like a little ritual to make these individual salads.  One of those places where it pays off, I guess, to create a tiny loveliness in a tiny part of the day.