The Salad Days

I have become an eater of salads. I decided that with another person in my household it was worthwhile to buy salad greens, because, with help, I could finish a bag before the leaves turned to slime. My sister makes fantastic salads, so we followed her lead on the basic salad construction, which is as follows:

1. mix of greens

2. fruit--pear, mango, apple, or orange slices are the best

3. gorgonzola cheese

4. toasted walnuts--We don't have these, so we leave them out. Soon I'm going to try hazelnuts, which we do have.

5. oil and vinegar with a touch of salt and/or pepper

We started with that idea, but it's only a loose guide. The stores here sell whole, roasted, peeled beets packaged and ready to eat, so we always chop up a beet and throw it in, and I like to add dried cherries or dried cranberries. Saturday night we just had salad and cornbread muffins (the cornmeal had to be tracked down at Mr. Fu's, a warehouse that sells African foods) for dinner, so we boiled an egg and added that to the salad and I like cucumber or peppers in my salads.

The tricky part is the oil and vinegar dressing which we haven't entirely mastered yet but which Steve is getting very good at with the help of a cookbook we picked up a few days ago at a community sale in St. Andrews. If you have pointers, fire away.

Last Friday as we were making lunch, Steve started waxing poetical about our salads.

Steve: I think salads may be one of my favorite parts of our marriage. Yep, when I look back over our married life, I'm really so pleased with the salad aspect.

MBC: When you look back over our long married history?

Steve: Yes, when I think about our weeks of marriage, I just love the salads.

MBC: We won't be married weeks until tomorrow. Tomorrow makes two weeks of marriage.

Steve (completely undeterred): When I look over our days of marriage, I think salad.