I only like cauliflower and broccoli raw, too. They’re great in salad. Do you like cucumbers, radishes, onion, spinich? I’d make a huge “basic” salad about once a week, stored in a Tupperware cake saver, then at least once a day I’d make a different variety. Sometimes add carrots and broccoli. Sometimes red onion, cucumbers and cauliflower. And nuts are good, walnuts, pecans etc. Raisins or cranrasins. You could try different combinations.
You can also find fat-free croutons that aren’t hard as a rock, different flavors. And to me a little bit of dressing goes a long way, but I do like salt & pepper. I don’t use cheese, eggs or meat on mine but by the time the salad is ready it’s really tasty and filling. An easy way to get your vegetables instead of cooking and dirtying a lot of pots.
Or you could do like I do and eat salad without dressing. (Why do they keep throwing me out of restaurants?)
But seriously, I never met a salad dressing I didn’t hate, so I do eat them dressing-free. I do get the occasional astonished “You want it dry?!”, to which I’m tempted to reply “Honey, if your salad is really dry, pouring strange goo on it won’t help.”
I’m going to tell you two words that will change your life:
Salad Bar
I don’t like it either, or vegetables in general. I eat it like medicine when I eat at all; for health reasons.
nm
You can put bacon on salad you know. Plus, forget the iceberg lettuce; there are all sorts of really tasty more interesting lettuces out there. And tons of different dressings. I’m not a big fan of ranch, but I do love Russian dressing and honey mustard and a vinaigrette and lots more. The thing about salads is that you construct it from ingredients you do like. I’m rather fond of potato salad and cole slaw also, though my father’s, learned from when he ran a lunch counter, was the best.
What do you like to eat?
If you have an extremely limited palate it’s hardly surprising you would not like salad. Salad typically has a number of strong taste notes and interesting textures that dance around the greens. Liking salads and being a very picky eater are generally not synonymous.
For me, the weird part is that I *do *like many of the things that go into salads: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, celery, cabbage, cheese, eggs, nuts, etc.–but all of those things together (or even any three of them) are revolting to me. And most dressings are terrible as well.
The only salad I genuinely like is a “proper” Caesar with just Romaine as the vegetable component. The lettuce is a carrier for the dressing, which is basically umami overload.
A few people at work get salads regularly, and I just don’t understand it. As I said, I like most of the individual ingredients, but they pile them all together into some absurd mishmash. I mean, most flavor combinations don’t work–half the art in cooking is finding that 1% of 1% of 1% of flavor combinations that are fantastic together–so how could a random assortment of veggies/nuts/dairy/fruit/etc. possibly work?
It’s not random. I choose salad ingredients that I think go together; different salads, different ingredients, not just the kitchen sink thrown together. You may not like my choices, but that doesn’t make them a random mish-mash.
- Add bacon.
- Do you like this salad? If no, go to1.
How do you usually eat lettuce, if not in salad form?
Mmmm…salad! I love salad! What’s not to love? You put in the greens combo and added veggies that you enjoy, can or cannot add fruits, nuts, even meats. All just a delivery vehicle for a dressing you love!
When I was put on a severely restricted low sodium diet, salad got a lot harder. Dressing tends to be sodium rich! But I eventually discovered a sodium free, homemade sesame and poppy seed dressing, I could buy from a local restaurant. For me, it means I have a very yummy salad almost every day as my lunch. Almost zero sodium! Which leaves me more sodium to have at dinner! It’s easy, yummy, and makes managing the low sodium thing oh so much easier.
Mmmmm…salad!
One of my greatest annoyances is the inappropriate things people insist on calling salads.
Take a bowl of mayonnaise, add some bleached flour egg noodles, a hard boiled egg and a quarter of a diced onion and call it Noodle Salad. Blech!
I’ll politely disagree with you on that because of one point: Mayo. For my tastes, mayo makes pretty much anything good. I like mayo on just about anything.
I’ll politely disagree with you on that because of one point: Mayo. For my tastes, mayo makes pretty much anything inedible.
It’s an infinite loop!!!
I agree that salad from an enjoyment perspective is essentially pointless.
It’s very healthy and has tons of good stuff in it, but as noted upthread, it’s basically ‘food medicine’.
That said, it can be improved upon with stuff you like. There’s no ‘right’ salad. Add eggs or steak or chicken or cranberries or almonds or cheese or whatever. As long as you get some leafy greens in there, it’s still salad.
So even if a salad tastes good, I can’t enjoy it?
Yes. I’m saying that nobody is allowed to enjoy a salad.
Sigh.
It’s not food medicine. Even the worst salads are very tasty. Unless it’s literally brown or slimy, it’s great.