Ensalada Mondatta

My friend Maredith demands that I write something new, so I’m going to write about salad. Salad is pretty awesome. You can make it with lettuce, or with eggs, or with tuna. Salad is supposed to be eaten cold. When salad is made with lettuce, it’s great for digestion and elimination, because lettuce, as well as any other vegetable and fruit, is full of fiber. Fiber is the undigestable portion of your food, and is essential for helping carry water through your intestines and out to your colon where the extra water will help keep your stools from being too hard. Ultimately, the more fiber you eat, the healthier you will be. And so that’s why I eat salad.

You can use many different kinds of lettuce for your salad. Most boring Americans use iceberg lettuce, which contains a lot of water, is crispy as long as it’s kept cold and wet, and has large leaves (perfect for sandwiches and burgers, too), but iceberg contains very little flavor or nutrition. Nobody should eat iceberg lettuce if they have a better choice. Another lettuce you could use is romaine lettuce, which contains more flavor, a more wrinkled texture, and has smaller, crunchier leaves. I like romaine, personally. It’s pretty good on sandwiches, but just fine as a salad. A third kind of lettuce is called arugala, which is used a lot in a salad variety called “spring mix”. It has uniquely-shaped leaves, a thin, dark green color, and a ton of flavor and vitamin C. It’s good stuff, and sometimes it goes great on those high-falutin’ sandwiches you find at a deli in a white neighborhood.

I like to add extra vegetables to my salad. I always have green onions (shallots, to you yankees) on hand in the fridge, so I clip off the roots of two stalks, trim the leaf tips, and chop up the green ends of the stalks into little bits of diced onion. Those go on top of the salad. I eat the white part of the stalks between bites of salad or sandwich. I also like to add tomatos; cherry tomatos are my favorite (be sure to wash them first). Sometimes, I’ll have other veggies like baby corn, olives, palm hearts. So tasty.

What dressing you use is based on personal preference. I like lighter dressings, so most times I’ll get either French or Italian dressing, but on occasion I have been known to be a fat American and use ranch dressing. Something about that creamy dreamy manufactured texture sets my taste buds at ease. Ranch dressing also goes good on manufactured “baby carrots” as well as buffalo wings which are manufactured from the arms of tiny immature chickens. Tasty!

Ok, that’s all I know about salad. You should have a salad too. I make a unique salad, and you make a unique salad, too. It’s as individual as each of us. We should totally get together some time and eat each other’s salad for a bit of variety. Ok, bye.