I’m an idiot and left out important ingredients:
tomatoes
blue or feta cheese crumbled on salad
These are key!
That’s a salad? Sounds more like a heart attack in a bowl.
Personally, I recommend:
Butternut Lettuce - If you find iceberg too bland and leafy ones like romaine too much like grass clippings.
Assorted Goya Beans: Garbozo (chick peas), et al.
I’ll also 2nd others recommendations:
Onion - It’s not just for Jimmy Buffet Cheeseburgers anymore
Bell pepper - With orange, red, yellow and now purple - almost have a color for every day of the week
Mixing in Field Greens - For color and different tastes
A Sliced Hard Burled Egg - You can buy them already made down at the neighborhood bodega or old man’s bar for a quarter.
I love salads and have learned over the years to keep them simple. Sometimes less is more! My basic salad includes:
Lettuce (NEVER iceburg!!)
Tomatoes
Artichoke Hearts (I just used whole canned, non-marinated)
A few sprigs of cilantro or Italian parsley
Additions include:
Dried cranberries or dried cherries
Raisins (I prefer golden)
Bean Sprouts
Make sure to add a protein. One of the following:
Grilled chicken (well seasoned, no skin)
Shrimp from the deli (the mini shrimp are great!)
Deli Meat
Hard-boiled egg
Feta Cheese (or other cheese of your choice)
Dressing:
I use the real thing, but VERY small amounts. My preference is a really good Caesar dressing. Then I add the juice of fresh lemon. . .at least a quarter to a third of the lemon. You will get all of the flavor, have plenty to moisten your entire salad, and cut the fat and calories tremendously! The trick is to get a dressing that “marries” well with the lemon juice. Ranch and blue cheese also work well.
Good luck! A good fresh salad can’t be beat.
Other people have mentioned nuts and seeds. A handful of walnuts, pecans, almonds, pine nuts, or sunflower seeds really add something to a salad. Chickpeas are cooked, but so delicious. I think all of those ingredients somehow sweeten up the greens, and you might appreciate that if you find some vegetables to be bitter.
If you need a very quick dressing, mix three parts olive oil with one part vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. Or try my favorite, a mustard vinegarette: three parts oil, one part vinegar, one part mustard. Blend very well. My favorite combination is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and whole-grain mustard. Good on any lettuce-based salad, no matter what vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, meats, cheeses, french fries, or dried fruits are added. Also good on beets, asparagus, or artichokes.
If I have the same salad combo or same dressing over and over again, I get sick of it. I eat a lot of salads, but I mix and match the ingredients. This is kind of strange, but I prefer most of my salad ingredients either chopped up very small or grated. If you don’t really care for, say, zucchini, you may find that while you don’t like a full mouthful of zucchini, a little chunk is a nice addition to a mouthful of, say, lettuce, shredded carrots, chicken, and almonds.
I adore this salad, which is simplicity itself:
Fresh greens (I like spinach, mixed is good too)
Sun-dried tomatoes (dry or packed in olive oil, both work) sliced thinly
Pine nuts
Add the merest splash of vinaigrette, and let it sing to your taste buds.
Two words: goat cheese.
You could crumble goat cheese over a dirty diaper and it would taste, well, nasty. So don’t do that. But put it on salads. Goat cheese is yummy on salads.
One of my favorite things to add to salad (I don’t like dressings) is fresh herbs – specifically, basil, thyme, or mint. Chop it up or chiffonade it and just mix it with the rest of the greens, and you’re good to go.
Also, toasted slivered almonds are divine – put them in a skillet with a couple of pinches of sugar, and cook over medium high heat until they brown. Careful, they’ll go from “perfectly done” to “burnt to a crisp” in about 10 seconds! But they are great in a salad.
Those crunchy noodle things are good, too.
Well, everyone here’s pretty much summed up everything I have to say, but I will say:
If you don’t care much for iceberg lettuce, (It tastes really bitter to me… nothing except bitterness) try spinach leaves. I cannot stand canned spinach; the smell makes me gag, but I love fresh spinach.
Newman’s Own low calorie red wine vinaigrette is the best dressing of its kind I’ve ever found. I think I saw it in the store once. Maybe. I just bring it home from work… just go get a pack for 30 cents at McDonald’s.
Going with the whole Italian/vinaigrette dressing idea, pears. Yup, try some pears. Cubed-ish. Then again, I like pears more than I really should, but I think it’s delicious.
Tomatoes are vital. It’s not a salad without them. Unless it’s a Caesar salad, and then I still like them. (I know, die, heretic, die)
Bell peppers and mushrooms are also good, if you like them.
But the main thing is to put things in it that you like. Me + cucumber/zucchini = bleauuughhhh vomit “Mom, I threw up from the salad!”
(Dried cranberries and toasted almonds? Yum! Never tried it before, but I’ll definitely have to try it. Anyone done it with dried apricots? I love those too.)
If you ignore everything else but do this, your salad will improve tremendously. We do this at my house by making the sald in a tupperware container, putting the lid on, and shaking it. Easy as can be, and the salads rock.
Our salads usually consist of:
-Mixed greens
-Sliced carrots
-Toasted walnuts
-Homemade pickled red onions (yum!)
-Dressing
and after we’ve finished our bowl of salad, we’ll absent-mindedly fish out the last tasty nuggets from the bottom of the tupperware bowl, because it’s so damn tasty.
Daniel
I just had a nice one tonight that involved not one leaf of lettuce. It was grape tomatoes, feta cheese, black olives, baby spinach leaves, and some Romano dressing.
I also saw one on TV that I want to make: cherry and grape tomatoes tossed with feta and various fresh herbs such as oregano and thyme.
One of my very favorite salads is from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home cookbook and doesn’t involve any lettuce at all - Carrot Parsley Salad.
Basically, grate some carrots, finely chop some flat-leaf parsley, mince a little garlic, and mix it all together with some lemon juice and a drizzle of oil. You can salt and pepper to taste, but I like it without.
You can vary the amounts of parsley and garlic according to how much you like parsley and garlic. YUM!
Many vegetables can be eaten raw, with just a simple oil and/or vinegar dressing. My father slices raw tomatoes and drizzles them with olive oil and wine vinegar. Then he sprinkles various Italian herbs on them, such as oregano and basil, and adds a little salt and pepper. Since he gets the tomatoes from a neighbor who has a garden, the tomatoes by themselves are delicious. But after they’ve been fancied up like this, they make a splendid salad.
My husband likes to make a cucumber and onion salad, he just slices cucumbers, dices onions, and puts them in a bowl and tosses them with a little vinegar. Then he lets the salad set for a while in the fridge. This is a very refreshing salad on a hot day, and it can be made in the morning.
A good basic rule of thumb is to have different colors in the salad…for instance, if you have red tomatoes, try for green bell peppers, but if you have yellow tomatoes, go for green peppers. If you have at least three colors in the salad, it’s likely to be tasty and interesting.
I had a delicious salad last night that I just threw together with stuff I had in my fridge and cabinets.
It was half a bag of spinach (okay, that was there specifically for the salad), two roma tomatoes cut into eights and seeded, a quarter of a large red onion, a handful of green olives, some raw sunflower seeds, half a cucumber, crumbled bleu cheese, and a homemade balsamic vinagrette.
I’m going to make it again tonight since I still have most of its ingredients left.
My dinner tonight was the following:
Baby spinach leaves washed, dried and torn into smaller pieces
roasted red peppers chopped up
pinenuts slightly browned in a dry pan
chopped onion
dried cranberries
crumbled gorgonzola cheese
a good vinegrette
coarse ground black pepper
Mixed all together well. It was quite tasty.
Simple works good as well
Sping Mix (blend of fresh baby greens)
Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing (I prefer Cardini’s brand)
Blue cheese crumbles
Croutons
Toss greens, dressing, blue cheese & croutons
Enjoy
Another type of salad I like a lot is a Waldorf
Lots of variations, but a good simple one is
3 crisp apples
2 stalks of celery
mayonnaise
chopped walnuts
Slice apples (peeling is not required) into bit size pieces
chop celery (thin slices)
chop walnuts (to taste - I like more for the taste and added texture)
stir in mayonnaise (add enough to lightly coat everything)
Enjoy
Mmmmm…may I have a bite? Sounds like something I’d make and eat on a regular basis.
I really like to put noodles or canned tuna on my salads. And as the others have said, tossing your salad really helps with the flavor. It evenly coats the the lettuce with dressing. Makes it taste 10x better. BTW, where do you find these other types of lettuce? I’ve been having iceberg all my life. Man, I must have been living under a rock. mutter mutter
Some fantastic ideas that I can chew over (barrel of laughs).
I agree with the Newman’s ceasar salad dressing though. Pretty darn tasty if I may say so myself.
Any time. You know where I live. ;j
Try having slightly less salad and slightly more of other green vegetables that you like - cooked broccoli and green beans, for example, are more nutritious than most salads anyway.