I really love salads, the sort where every bite is different and unusual ingredients are added as inspiration takes hold. Up until recently, apart from leaves which I’ve just shredded, I’ve sliced all the different vegetables, then dressed them with oil, or mayonnaise, or tahini or a mixture of the three, or any left over dips, or just a very little balsamic vinegar. I only use a little because for some reason I get a coughing reaction to vinegar. Balsamic… I always think of a very early Delia Smith programme when balsamic was just becoming popular, and she kept mispronouncing it as baslamic!
Over the last few days, I’ve been cutting my salad vegetables into small cubes; it’s been too hot to buy lettuce and other leaves (I’m the only one who eats them and they don’t keep very well) So today I began my salad – recently I’ve been adding raw beetroot but today I forgot; sometimes I add raw carrot, but the only one we had was very limp so I left it to be cooked.
Salad today:
- cubed cucumber, skin on and ditto cubed courgette
- thick slices of spring onion, small squares of red onion
- red pepper
- tiny chunks of cheddar cheese
- small chunks of paté
- cubes of home-made bread that went wrong and came out more like a cake (husband’s not mine!)
- cashew nibs – we buy weigh your own cashews, and as well as the whole, halves and big bits, there are a lot of nibs which I sieve out to use for things like this – things like salad!
- a left over fried egg where the yolk had split and gone hard, cut into strips
- a small amount of Greek olive oil
- a small amount of mayonnaise
- a generous amount of Sriracha (chilli and garlic sauce)
- dried wrack (seaweed)
- ground mixed peppercorns and spices
I didn’t add any salt – I didn’t need to as there was plenty in the sauces and nibs, cheese and paté. I have to say it was jolly tasty and I’m sorry I haven’t a photo – I ate it before I remembered to take one!
Lois Elsden 