The One Big Dish and More of the Main Bit tend to be heavier slow-cooked foods, rich on flavour, but not much crunch. Some of the Very Lazy Sides bring in a bit of crunch and freshness, but we want more than that and more variety: lovely fresh crisp and crunchy salads, in the same spirit of utterly venal sloth that I've been inculcating for the last three posts. Enter: salads that last!
The schleppy bit of salad prep isn't actually the chopping - it's the rooting through the salad drawer for half a dozen different ingredients. For the chopping, a whole big lettuce isn't much more work than a quarter of a lettuce; you can chop six spring onions lying next to each other as easily as one; and so on. And if you want a varied salad, making a small one is actually more hassle, because you end up doing ridiculous things like using a quarter of a green pepper, then the other three-quarters is cut and exposed to going off. The only trick is keeping it fresh: damp softening salad isn't anyone's idea of lovely, fresh, crisp, or crunchy. So here's how, for the two main variants: green / summer salads and winter salads.
Green / summer salads
This is the salad we think of when we hear "salad": the standard base of lettuce, cucumber, tomato, etc, and then all its variants on top to make it a Greek salad, bacon & blue cheese salad, Caesar salad, etc.
How to keep it fresh
The cardinal rule with keeping green salad fresh is don't put anything wet in it. As soon as the leaves and bits touch wetness, they'll start to slump and it'll have lost its crunch within an hour, never mind several days. So that means...
- Dress it when you serve it: I make dressing in jars (which is handy for shaking them up to mix everything) and only dress the salad portions dished up onto our plates
- Deseed cucumbers: I resisted this for years because I hate waste, but then I discovered a new trick: I scrape the cucumber seeds into a large jar, fill it with water, and pop it in the fridge, and voila, a lovely cold cucumber-water drink for the mornings, made of freshness for when I trot down to make breakfast and am assailed by sudden thirst. The seeds are the wettest bit, so without those, the rest of the cucumber doesn't wet the salad leaves so much. To deseed them easily, cut the cucumber in half lengthways, then scrape a spoon down the centre to pull the seeds out. It takes about twenty seconds.
- Don't add chopped tomatoes: They're wet wet wet. Like the dressing, add chopped tomatoes when you serve it. You can add whole cherry tomatoes safely, but we keep those out the fridge anyway and it's just as easy to scatter them when we dish up.
- No mushrooms or apple or other wet food: Mushrooms shrivel and go miserable and make everything else sad; apples go brown. Fruit like orange segments are wet, so they're out too. Avocado goes brown almost instantly and is wet.
- Keep it tightly sealed in the fridge: Find a tupperware the exact right size, so there's as little extra air as possible in the container. Don't push the salad down to fit it all in though - crushing the leaves will again hasten their softening.
- Take what you're having out the fridge: Fridge-cold salad is a bit meh, it's nicer if it's allowed to lose that edge of chill. About half an hour before we eat, I take the amount we'll be having out the fridge and pop it in a bowl, covered, to lose its fridge-cold. Don't take the entire salad out the fridge to warm up and then pop the rest back in - that'll speed up its demise.
With these strategies, a green salad can last very happily in the fridge for four days, without losing its lovely crunch. So that might be a side for two or three meals, it might be a salad-based lunch as well, and it won't always be the same salad because we're going to mix up what goes on top of it in a moment. But first, having told you what to keep out, here's...
What to put in the salad base
What you add is completely up to you, but here are some of the ingredients that are happy living in the fridge chopped up, as part of the salad base:
- salad leaves - I like the crunchier ones, romaine and little gems
- cucumber, deseeded
- spring onion
- normal onion, red or white, finely sliced (see below for the shake-it-up technique to separate the bits)
- red green and yellow peppers, finely sliced
- baby spinach
- sliced raw courgette
- celery
- mange tout
- watercress, rocket, etc
Adding variety
Your salad base is a perfectly respectable green salad all on its own, to go with lasagna or whatever you fancy. If you're eating it several times, though, it's nice to turn it into several different salads with the final toppings. So these are some of my favourites:
- bacon and blue cheese: I often make this as one big salad to go in the fridge like that, but you can also fry a couple of extra rashers in the morning to crumble over the salad later, along with some stilton, Oxford blue, or what you will.
- bacon and avocado
- prosciutto and blue cheese: prosciutto slices are very happy in the freezer and then you can just pull out a few slices when you take the salad out to de-chill. Because they're so thin, they defrost at lightning speed.
- Greek salad: feta and olives
- apple and walnuts
- other nuts / seeds sprinkled over
- croutons, because sometimes you want salad to hurt
For most of these I add tomatoes as well, at this point. And of course, a beautiful dressing makes a salad sing, so I've got a couple recipes for that at the bottom. But first, the other half of the season:
Winter salads
My cousin introduced me to these when she was looking after me when I was very poorly, and it blew my mind. When I later asked her for the recipe, she laughed and laughed and laughed... It wasn't a recipe, it was a principle. A concept. An idea. And the principle / concept / idea that blew my tastebuds away so memorably was: finely sliced root veg and winter veg, all raw. I don't think I'd have leapt at that idea if she hadn't made it for me first, but it is spectacular. And then I discovered, to my great delight, that it keeps very happily in the fridge, in its sealed container, for seven days - possibly more, I haven't tried it further than that. Because all the ingredients are already hardy long-lasting ones, without much moisture of their own, none of that filmsy summery wilting stuff, it's fantastically durable.
This crunchy salad goes especially well with rich foods and softer foods that want some textural variety. I usually have it with jewel bake, haggis and mash, sausage stew and mash, Rachel Roddy's mushroom and mash, anything with mash, Moroccan stew and couscous.
Ingredients
For the ingredients, pick any combination of these, all raw:
- beetroot
- carrot
- celeriac
- fennel
- chicory
- red cabbage (not green, most of the green ones are too soft / rubbery)
- Chinese lettuce
- Napa cabbage
- onion
- spring onion
I might have forgotten a few possibilities - basically anything with a leaf or layers that's firm and crisp, and any root vegetable that you can eat raw. I try to get a variety of colours going if possible, so red cabbage is especially handy there; I didn't have any when I made the one in the photo. (That one's carrot, Chinese lettuce, onion, and a sprinkle of spring onion - I would've liked more spring onion, for the green, but that was all we had.) Beetroot is fantastic and will turn the entire salad brilliant deep pinky-purple.
Prep
To prep it, you want it as finely sliced as possible. For the root vegetables, a mandoline is a godsend here. It's much sharper than a grater, so it doesn't release as much moisture from the veg (moisture will make it lose its crispness sooner) and makes perfect little sticks at lightning speed. Here it is, in action...
When it does carrots, I end up with a flattened slice that doesn't want to go through - I could chop those by hand but there's usually a dish coming up that'll use carrot in it, so I pop the nubs in the fridge in a little tupperware, and then the blender-chopper will blitz them into little pieces for me.
This lot went into a big bolognese a couple of days later. Note that I'm not peeling the carrots. I don't peel the beetroot, either, only the celeriac which has tough dirty skin.
For the non-root vegetables, finely slicing is easy enough. Some things cling together, though, especially onions, so I have a nifty speed-trick for that too, so you're not up to your elbows in onion slices patiently prying them apart:
Chuck them in a tupperware that has a lid.
Give them a quick brisk shake about.
Variations
Again, this is a perfect salad as-is, especially with a good dressing. To mix it up, though, here are a few things you could add to that day's serving:
- chopped crisp apple
- toasted walnuts
- other nuts / toasted seeds
- chopped orange segments
- pomegranate seeds if you're Yotam sodding Ottolenghi, why anyone wants that all over their food they're actually going to eat not just photograph I don't know, it's a constant hazard of biting into the bitter pip, but if that's your thing, I'm not going to judge you. Well, I am, and I already have, but it's your kitchen and your mouth. They do look beautiful but I'd rather crunch down safely.
Bonus variation: stirfry!
It's incredibly easy to make vast quantities of the winter salad (especially if you have a mandoline) and it's filling and crunchy enough that you often end up having smaller portions of it than a green salad, and then you win an easy almost-instant stirfy, as an insanely quick and healthy lunch.
You can use any stirfry recipe or method to turn your winter salad into stirfry. The easiest no-chopping version of this I've made is an adaptation of this recipe for vegetable stir-fry with peanuts. I didn't have noodles, so I left those out. I whisked two eggs with a pinch of salt, mixed 1/4 cup soy sauce with 2 Tablespoons bottled lime juice and 2 teaspoons of Sriracha (they said 1/2 teaspoon), flash-fried the veg, pushed the veg aside and turned the heat down so I could fry the eggs in the middle of the pan into an omelette, chopped up the omelette with the spatula, poured over the soy-lime-Sriracha mix, stirred it, and had it topped with roast peanuts. Healthy hot lunch in five minutes on a cold, busy and tired day = WIN.
Salad dressings
There are absolutely heaps of these out there and no doubt I'll learn more about them and write some later post, but these are my two current favourites:
Perfect classic French dressing
4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp lighter oil
2 tbsp red-wine vinegar
2 tsp dijon mustard
2 tsp caster sugar
1 garlic clove, very finely grated or crushed to a paste
Salt and black pepper, to taste
This is straight from Gill Meller's recipe for her egg and tomato salad, and after years of eyeing up quantities thinking I'm a pro, now I just follow this exactly, because it's perfect. Well - almost exactly. I don't have caster sugar, so I use 1.5 teaspoons of the regular kind. I mash the garlic, sugar, salt, and pepper in the mortar and pestle to really crush the garlic, then add the mustard and mix that well, then scrape it into a jar, add the oils and vinegar, tighten the lid on the jar, and shake it well. For the lighter vinegar she uses sunflower oil. I can't bear sunflower oil, so I use peanut oil, the only other one I have. It is worth not using all olive oil, though, for reasons I can't explain, it just makes it better.
Light dressing
If I want something a bit lighter, eg for a winter salad alongside a rich dish, I follow much the same principle but with a few swapsies:
- half the amount of mustard or just a pinch of hot English mustard (you need a bit of mustard, to help the dressing emulsify)
- a tablespoon less each of the oil and vinegar, swapped for 2 tablespoons of a tasty brine. I keep the brine from things like olives, gherkins, preserved lemons, etc, in the emptied jars in the fridge, to use for things like dressings
- a light flavoured oil if possible: if I have roast peppers or artichokes or whatnot in oil, I keep the flavoured oil the same as I do the brine, and use that as my lighter oil
If I'm feeling very lazy, I might not make a proper dressing the day I make the salad, just slosh a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the portions we're having that night, but that's fine - when the already-made salad reappears, I'll have the extra energy then to whip up a dressing, or there might be some left over from the last time, and so on round.
So all this lazy cooking is actually turning out a ton of incredibly healthy and well-balanced meals, probably with more variety and more of your five/ten/twelve-a-day than cooking every night, and plenty of fresh and raw ingredients in the mix as well, plus you're more likely to have salad as a lunch option if it's already made, or a speedy stirfry if you want something hot. Plus, the less of the daily-grind cooking you're doing, the more energy gets freed up to explore new recipes.
There are still more tricks to come in the neverending cascade of The Secrets To My Laziness, but as November is already upon us and I've missed a few weekends' blogging because of laptop disasters and suchlike, I might jump straight to some suggestions for equipment, for the next post, so there's time to add stuff you fancy to your Christmas wish-list.