A Veggie Pizza Salad with Tomato "Jam." A Favorite Arugula and Cucumber Salad with Feta. 🥒
Simple salads with familiar flavors that are just plain good—with no terrifying surprises!
PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING WE EAT here at the DOS gets examined through salad-colored glasses: Would this summer roll make a good salad? (Yes, and here’s the recipe). Would chips and dip? Why not? (That recipe is in this issue.) A hot dog? Maybe, but not on our watch.
We’ve also been happy to turn salad into soup, as in this issue, and to turn salad into sandwiches, as in this issue. (Both are ideas that have been around forever, of course.)
(But the truth is probably that sandwiches and other dishes mimic salads more often than salads mimic them, because salads are dazzling and beg to be imitated. For example, the Caesar Salad Pasta, in this issue.)
Whether this instinct to plumb any given food’s salad potential is a feature or a bug in our psychic coding is still up for debate, but at this point we can’t really see the value in investigating the how or why of it any further. To use one of the most despicable cliches of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: It is what it is.
Plus, a nice thing about this instinct is that it has always acted as a sort of propeller, moving us forward, toward whatever’s around the next corner. It has helped us soldier on!
But lately, the boys in the lab and I are actually afraid of corners. I find myself avoiding them—and instead daydreaming about flying around the earth at super-speed, like Superman, to reverse time, even though it is forbidden. And even though my past is not exactly a day at the beach.
I’ve even become a little wary of surprises, which I used to love, especially when it comes to food. Right now, I just want to be alone with my creamy dressings and a crisper full of heads of iceberg. And the visions that dance in my head when I’m snug in my bed are of mashed potatoes with butter and sour cream, numbing amounts of salty black licorice, cherry pie a la mode, and salty buttered popcorn. But these are all dishes that defy our reinvention efforts when it comes to salad making.