Would (or Do) You Have a House Salad?

“I unrecorded for a bully location salad,” writes Pittsburgh-based Jessica Merchant successful her caller cookbook Easy Everyday, which I’ve been loving this month. “For immoderate reason, a fewer years agone I became obsessed with the thought of having a signature location salad. An incredible, flavorful greenish salad…that tastes fantastic with astir each recipe.”

Isn’t that a amusive idea? Her ain location salad, she explains, has greens, carrots, tomatoes, onions and croutons, positive 2 standouts: asiago food and sunflower seeds.

As I was speechmaking Jessica’s cookbook, I realized that my person Liz Libré has a location salad. For much than a decade, she’s been making arugula with a lemony vinaigrette. (We adjacent talked astir it successful her 2016 location tour!) “Five-year-old Griffin is the biggest crockery eater successful our location due to the fact that of the dressing,” she told maine backmost then. “He ever has seconds.” Now property 14, helium inactive loves it. (The dressing recipe: “I ne'er measure, but it’s fundamentally a bully magnitude of olive lipid and champagne vinegar, foodstuff of fractional a lemon, 1 oregon 2 minced ail cloves, a small Dijon mustard, a small mayo, and brackish and pepper.”)

Also, I realized with a bosom pang, my dad has 1 (pictured above). “Mine’s precise basic,” helium told maine connected the telephone this morning, laughing truthful overmuch that I was asking for his recipe. “I similar the otherwise colored variegated tomatoes, I ever person mushrooms and usually a premix of doorbell peppers, and I’ll bash avocado, if avocados are good.” Sometimes helium makes the dressing himself (“mainly olive oil, dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar, conscionable slush it and that’s my dressing, we utilized to marque it successful France astatine lunchtime, it tin beryllium truly tangy if you enactment tons of mustard”); different times, helium goes with Newman’s Own oregon Garlic Expressions (“I bounce around”). He’s made the crockery a gazillion times for us, and helium estimates that he’s eaten it “probably each different day, for 20 years. Boring, huh?” Then helium laughs again.

Would (or do) you person a location salad? I’m into the idea.

P.S. A instrumentality for amended salads, five salads without lettuce, and the magic of candles.