Monday, September 21, 2009

Aunt Salad

I'm not a huge salad fan but when I do make one, I like them to have lots of variety and texture. When I was in my teens, my California-raised Aunt Sally served us a salad one evening that remains fixed in my memory even today.

Unlike the salads served in our home, which consisted mainly of lettuce and tomato with the occasional half an avocado shared among six diners, this salad was filled with raw crunchy broccoli, green and purple onions, cherry tomatoes, red and yellow bell peppers, several kinds of lettuce, raw cauliflower, marinated artichoke hearts and big, big chunks of rich, buttery avocado all bound together into one glorious whole by a nice lemon vinaigrette. I make this kind of bumpy, generous salad whenever I'm presented with a salad bar and, just occasionally, at home.

This particular salad was also graced a sprinkle of grated cheese and a lovely slab of perfectly grilled and lightly soy seasoned salmon that I bought, ready made, at Andronico's last time I did my shopping. It had been a hot, hot day and only a salad would do for dinner so I pulled out the crisper drawer and got to chopping. It was a cornucopia of fresh California produce, topped with the bounty of the sea at our doorstep. Cool, crisp, satisfyingly chewy-crunchy, it brought Aunt Sally's memorable salad to mind.


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3 Comments:

Blogger Kailyn said...

Yum. Whenever folks tell me that they don't really like salad, I say that there probably is not enough variety in color and texture. Of course any good meal needs variety in my opinion.

Monday, September 21, 2009  
Blogger cookiecrumb said...

Zoomie, I bet you'd be tickled to death reading one of Helen Evans Brown's mid-century California cookbooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Helen-Browns-West-coast-cook/dp/0517129310

(word verification = ingst)

Monday, September 21, 2009  
Blogger Zoomie said...

Kailyn, you're right, it's all the tastes and textures together that makes salad great.

Cookiecrumb, I'll bet that's where this salad came from originally!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009  

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