I enjoy salad, but like everything you have to learn how to make one. Just because it’s at it’s simplest a pile of veggies doesn’t make it easy to make a good dish. I find that the key to a satisfying salad is 1-2 tablespoons of at least 2 of the following:
good cheese, e.g. gorgonzola or feta
nuts, maybe almond slivers or pecans, maybe candied
dried fruit, I like craisins or dried cherries
fresh fruit, like apple or pear but I’ve even used kiwi, which blew my dad’s mind
bacon
The cheese is especially essential for me because then I can get away using considerably less dressing, in my gung-ho weight loss days I’d just use a fine balsamic vinegar and make a whole meal of tons of veggies, a little fruit and an ounce of feta.
See, I hate mayo and most cream-based and mayo-based dressings, and bacon is one of my least favorite foods. Yet there are plenty of tasty salads that do not have any of those ingredients (thankfully). Vinagrettes are awesome, pico de gallo is wonderful, chunky salsas are a delicious meal, and tabuleh is divine.
But plain lettuce, tomato, and onions? Yea, I skip those “salads”.
I eat salads that contain something that I don’t like all the time without ending up eating that item. Sure, watery beets in the salad can ruin the whole thing but a cucumber slice is easy to avoid.
I regularly eat salads without any dressing or just a minimum of dressing. And never dumped all over it. If I am in charge of making the salad and thus put in it only things I am willing to eat, and that combine together in a pleasing way, then dressing becomes relatively unimportant. And if I still want it, it is on the side and I’ll dip my fork in the dressing before getting some salad with it so that there is just a bare minimum of dressing for flavor.
For me it is because I like most vegetables raw but really don’t care for them cooked. But admittedly most restaurant salads are a risk because I can’t be sure what they’ll put in them. Or it’ll come out and just be a pile of iceberg with a red onion ring on it or just a pile of arugula (which I like as a component of salad but not all by itself as the base for it).
Then, of course, there are the salads of my family’s midwestern Church basement originas wherein a salad isn’t a salad unless it contains at least one of these of three: mayonnaise, jello, or miracle whip.
I wouldn’t even count leafy greens as a requirement. Cucumber salad and beet salad, for instance, are wonderful salads and don’t even require greens. I could eat either as a main meal, especially the beet salad, with some walnuts, goat cheese, a light vinaigrette and a slice of fresh bread on the side. Mmmmm… I’m getting hungry.
Maybe I was too sarcastic, but they’re not pointless from an enjoyment perspective. If they’re good, they’re very enjoyable. If you don’t like them in the first place I’m sure it’s a different story.
I don’t like leafy salads at all. The only way I like leafy vegetables is boiled to bring out their natural, delicious bitterness (spinach, cabbage). Fuck iceberg lettuce, fuck it right in the ear! I also dislike carrots. I like raw red cabbage, but not in those tiny little pieces–you can’t even taste the little strings they put in pre-fab bags of salad.
The way I make salad, it ends up as a bowl of chunky veggies. I like to slice up a tomato, cucumber, and green pepper and jumble it all together. Then I add cubes of monterey jack cheese and drown it all in Italian dressing. It’s flavorful and incredibly filling. And probably incredibly fattening.
I understand about salad dressings. I dislike most salad dressings – they have some sort of a “fake” flavor, unless freshly made. But once a fancy olive oil store opened near here, I started dressing my salads with a touch of tarragon-infused olive oil, maybe mixed with either grapefruit or tangerine vinegar, or just the tarragon oil alone. Makes a vast difference.
Aside from the raw green veggie salads, or meat and cobb salads, there are also bulgar wheat salads (tabbouleh) and I used to make a fantastic lentil and broccoli salad, with a tangerine dressing. You can make anything into a salad!
I love the stuff. I’ll tear off big handfuls of it, right from the head, and eat it without any addition whatever. I also like to eat celery sticks, or bell peppers, or carrots, just as they are.
Zjestika mentioned nuts, and, while I love nuts (I am what I eat) I don’t like 'em in salad, because you can’t stab 'em with a fork! They always end up accumulating at the bottom of the plate at the end, and require a spoon for mopping-up operations.
Now, nuts in trail-mix: yes indeed! But for salad, they don’t work (for me) for purely mechanical reasons.
