Looking for ideas on how not to make a horrible tasting salad. The last salad I tried to make was all lettuce and three slices of tomato. It wasn’t that good.
First, skip the lettuce. Spinach or mixed greens (or some of each) will be better. Look over the other ingredients and pick three or four of them, not some of each. Aim for a variety of flavors and textures, like beans for softness, cucumber or carrot for crunch, some kind of meat for umami. Maybe sprinkle on some nuts or sesame seeds if you like. Go light on the dressing.
Boil some peeled potatoes and let them get cold. Dice them and chop up some spring onions or chives. Mix with mayo.
Now mix some shredded lettuce - or smaller lettuce leaves - with some chopped bell peppers. Dress with a little vinaigrette.
Slice some tomatoes. Chop up some spring onions or chives. Mix and dress with vinaigrette. The tomatoes should be swimming. Leave to mature in the fridge overnight. Just serve the tomato slices.
Serve some of each of the above on a plate with meat of some kind. Cold beef is good. Eat.
Depends on what’s at the salad bar. If we hit Souplantation for lunch, my tray will likely have:
Plate #1: lettuce, lots, shredded cheese, chopped egg, sliced mushrooms, French or Thousand Island dressing
Plate #2: pickles, onions, focaccia, cole slaw, broccoli slaw, potato salad, macaroni salad
Bowl #1: chili or French Onion soup
If you want to build a decent salad at a salad bar, you have to find a good one. Souplantation, Sizzler, Claim Jumper all have a wide variety of offerings.
Put everything on it. The Key is the dressing.
Two scoops of Blue Cheese, One scoop of Italian.
Mostly macaroni and potato salad. The reason is at Wendy’s you’re given only a 5" x 6" styro plate, and none too deep. So you try to produce something like a truncated pyramid, with various layers of stiff material that can “cake up” well. Record I know is a 12-inch high pile.
I’ve never tried mixing dressings; I’ll do that next time I’m at Souplantation! Thank you for the suggestion!
And, yes: everything! Pile it high!
The kind that is soup.
I like to put my ingredients in little piles, deconstructed. Then I can have a slightly different salad with each bite.
Greens topped with hard boiled egg, Ranch dressing, and those little deep-fried noodles if they have them. Not healthy, but very tasty. Avoids the nastier elements of the common salad bar.
Scotland has some fucked up salad bars.
I tend toward the minimal: mixed greens, a couple tomatoes, broccoli, shredded carrot, dressing. If there’s good looking olives or feta or sunflower seeds, though, I’ll throw some on.
Thing I realized with home salads is that you gotta toss them with the dressing. Nobody ever told me that! Dressing the salad right before it comes to the table makes it so much better. Usually there’s no way to do that on a salad bar salad, though: the plate’s too small.
o briens sandwiches did a take on waldorf (maybe?) loved it. celery, cashews grapes lettuce dressed the one I made (and I made granny salads like yours, so must be good!) with natural yoghurt but blue cheese could be nicer. the grapes, green ones we’re not animals, are what blew my tiny non salad eating mind!
Where we live now, I root through the lettuce bowl to find the darkest greens-- avoiding white, purple, red, and orange. Many raw veggies don’t agree with me, so I skip them. Cottage cheese, hard-boiled eggs, olives, mushrooms (not often available here), bleu cheese dressing, bacon bits, sunflower seeds.
Where are you that Wendy’s has a salad bar? :dubious: I remember them (& the hot bar) from when I was a kid, but they were phased out by the mid '90s.
Agreed. My solution is a kind of layered salad, where I spread out one level of each ingredient, drizzle a very fine stream of dressing over it, and eat until I can’t taste dressing any more. Then repeat. I like the CA salad chain Pluto’s, because they DO toss and dress the salad properly, in a big bowl, before passing it to you. http://www.plutosfreshfood.com/menu.html
I always gravitated to the cottage cheese and fruit, usually pineapple. I can never get enough fruit salad. My mom’s summer salads were always greens topped with a melange of fruit pieces swimming in mayo.
It depends somewhat on what I’ve been doing. Usually, if I’m at a place with a salad bar, it’s the after-party for an event that’s had me outside and active all day, and I’m at least a little parched. I pile a plate full of fruit and melons, so I can start with lots of juicy stuff. (This habit has bitten me in the past, when nice juicy citrus has hit cracked lips or even–on one particularly dehydrated day, cracked skin under my tongue.)
Otherwise: Light on the leafy greens (salad bars tend to have boring lettuce), heavy on things like cucumbers and peppers. A few tomatoes, for juiciness and contrast. Jicama, if they have it, for crunch and sweetness. Croutons, sunflower seeds for texture. Maybe bacon bits, because bacon. Balsamic vinaigrette. A slice or two of melon on the side, out of the dressing.
I always skip the iceberg lettuce and go straight for whatever other greens they have and better yet, some spinach. Garbanzo beans (or edamame if they have it), sunflower seeds, tomatoes. Sometimes I’ll skip the tomato in favor of strawberries, and top with balsamic vinaigrette. Bleu cheese crumbles, sprouts.
Really you can’t put too much on.
Italian dressing, or balsamic vinaigrette, and blue cheese crumbles on top of any salad. Spinach, baby greens with fresh strawberries, pineapple, mango and a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette or (if you can find it) poppyseed dressing - divine!
I must be the only one on earth who doesn’t like ranch dressing. One of the local pizza places stopped delivering wings with little cups of blue cheese dressing, now it’s big cups of ranch dressing. I put those aside for others who might want to put it on their salad sometime.
You are not alone. Ranch dressing is the Devil’s semen.