Rainbow-Colored Dance Party Salads, Part Trois
I want to put on my my my my my salad shoes, and boogie with you.
THE WINTER LANDSCAPE covering many parts of this planet right now looks as uninviting as beef stew, which, if you’ve never had it, is brown and beige with some overwrought flashes of orange trying to push through the morose hues, like the first terrified crocus of spring.
Not that I have anything against beef stew. In fact, let me recommend my favorite recipe for it, this perfect one, by the late and wonderful food writer Molly O’Neill. Let’s face it, though: Not even the New York Times photographer who shot the recipe can make this delicious dish look exactly gorgeous.
A lot of the cozy fortifying winter foods we eat when the weather is cold are drab and colorless and arrive in disturbing blobs. I have no problem with any of that, either. I’d pay someone $50 to bring me a giant bowl of the parmesan polenta with braised mushrooms I used to order every single time I went to a favorite neighborhood restaurant in Chicago. It looked exactly like the dog’s dinner, garnished with parsley, and it was pure, soothing heaven.
However, in the past decade or so, long after it had become clear that my SAD lamp was failing me, one of the things I realized I have to have in winter, in addition to the delicious blobs, is lots and lots of color. As the fantastic Diana Vreeland once said about style, color “helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning.” And she may as well have said it about color, because she loved that, too; especially red. There she is below, in her red living room in Manhattan, back in 1992, when she was still alive. She was not kidding around.
I started realizing how important color is to me when I moved back down south—to Charleston, SC—and noticed that everyone looked like they’d been born in a deluxe crayon box. Charleston is an especially saturated city, and after decades in Chicago and New York, where black and gray clothing are almost essential (if you lean against a dirty car, it doesn’t show), I initially found it almost overwhelming.
But the next thing I knew, I was wearing floral dresses and pink poplin shirts and lots and lots of variations of blue, which has always been one of my favorite colors. (It’s something I have in common with Friend of the Department of Salad (FOTDOS) Nik Sharma, whose gorgeous blue kitchen seems absolutely mood-elevating to me (and whose latest cookbook, if I haven’t mentioned it enough, is definitely one I recommend).
It may have taken forever, but I believe that purposely embracing color has improved my personality. At least a little bit, and, possibly, in a way that is apparent only to me. But still.
The idea of color’s magical power on our psyches is not exactly new, of course; there are a million studies ranging from “purely scientific” to “I believe in unicorns,” so no one needs me to be their color professor.
But I do believe that all of us tend to forget how uplifting a truly colorful plate of food can be—and not just in terms of the nutritional value of “eating the rainbow,” which is significant. No, a colorful salad can be like psychedelic winter drug, as I’ve mentioned here before, more than once.
And if I were your professor, your homework would be to use salad recreationally, all winter long, whenever you can.
Luckily, nature knows what we need. It’s citrus season—time to start supreming all the oranges (and grapefruits) you can get your hands on and incorporating them into your salads (or just eating them out of the Tupperware container, cold from the fridge).
The first salad I have today is a classic citrus dish you may have seen many times or even eaten in restaurants—but now it’s time to actually make it. (I’m talking to myself here.) The vivid combination of oranges, beets, and avocado is not only gorgeous but luscious, especially when you have a dressing that complements it as well as my White Balsamic and Orange Vinaigrette does. (I’m bragging, but this dressing really is a big WOW. 🌟)
Our second salad—which I came across while driving around in the Saladmobile, looking for ideas—gets a whole lot of its power from its dressing as well. It is my hopeful translation of a salad photograph I saw on the iconic California chef Nancy Silverton’s Instagram feed, taken while she was in Mexico City, where she had the salad at a spot called Martínez. (By the way, if you don’t know about this, you should: Silverton, Ruth Reichl, and Laurie Ochoa have a terrific new podcast, called Three Ingredients.)
I can’t be sure what kinds of restauranty secrets the much prettier salad at Martínez contains, but my pale imitator, which is nothing more than a vinaigrette-drenched plate of herb-flecked green ruffles decorated with abundant pepitas—is really wonderful. I hope you love it.
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