A Tostada Can Be a Salad!
Do we live in a great world or what?
WHEN YOU’RE IN THE SALAD BUSINESS, everything is obviously going to be—has to be— salad, salad, salad, salad. We’re not complaining. Salad is the very best food. Obviously.
But it takes a lot of extremely concentrated focus, because there are plenty of other delicious foods on this planet. A mushroom risotto will certainly turn our heads, as will freshly caught grilled trout, or a jumbo shrimp cocktail with extra cocktail sauce.
But sometimes, all it takes is the memory of a certain favorite food to throw us off our salad game. For instance, the tostada that floated into our brain and would not go away. We were so haunted we even looked online for “tostada restaurants.”
Since we were trying to focus on our job, we wondered if turning tostadas into a salad—killing two birds—would not be a fabulous idea/glorious disaster/delicious prank like the taco salad, which we’ve always wanted to offer here, despite its questionable roots.
(As we have mentioned before, the Tex-Mex taco salad remains the most popular “Mexican” salad in America, possibly because people have never tried the one mentioned at the end of this issue, or this Mexican salad, which is one of those dishes that you see and think, yeah, okay, maybe—and then you try it and you cannot stop gobbling it up.)
Since tostadas are truly a Mexican invention, an ancient one devised (like so many delicious things) out of thriftiness, I put making a tostada salad out of my mind. I had other things to do—and did I want to risk going down in history like the inventor of the 1950s “tacup”)? I wasn’t sure.
But I was sure that I didn’t want to end up like this poor woman on TikTok, who claimed to have invented “flat tacos” and was promptly devoured by the Stitchers.
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In the food world, it’s generally best if you never claim to have invented anything.
Luckily, by the time I’d realized that tostada salads were already a “thing,” I’d received a beautiful, brand new salad book by Jeanne Kelley, Vegetarian Salad for Dinner: Inventive Plant-Forward Meals, which contained an alluring tostada salad. Of course I tried it immediately.
It’s completely delicious—with an avocado-lime dressing I’d like to dip everything into—so I’m sharing it with you. Unlike the taco salads some of us devoured at fern bars in the 1980s, this salad leaves you feeling virtuous, fortified, and happy rather than sated, slightly confused, and in need of moist towelettes.
I will say right now that I took Kelley’s suggestion and instead of frying my own tortillas used good tortilla chips from the grocer. Delicious. And that my choice of greens was a mix of romaine, some baby spinach and dinosaur kale. Plus, I made the dressing twice. The second time, I used a heaping half cup of pumpkin seeds in the dressing, rather than an entire cup. Both were delicious, but I may have preferred the less seedy one.