To satisfy time after time, a salad needs to be complex. Even cows seek out variety, chomping on dandelions, daisies, and other bits of herbal spice to enrich their diet of plain old verdure. We humans can do so much more, especially if, like me, we live a few steps from the famous Monterey Market, a sort of everyday farmer’s market with local produce from around the world. It’s no problem mixing organic baby greens from a greenhouse a mile away with fresh turmeric from Thailand. And the back yard contributes mustard greens and a Japanese kale. My salad palette takes the orchestra as model. There need to be high notes, middle notes, and low notes. There needs to be sweet, middling, and bitter. There needs to be soft and also crunchy, and you absolutely have to have a vivid palette of colors. I’m particularly fond of root vegetables, raw, both for the trace minerals that the body needs and for their exotic, earthy tang. It’s the simultaneous mouth experience of these contradictories that satisfies and pleases, again and again.
I had fun making and editing this video, The Making of Meltaway Salad. It took a couple of hours to do all the washing, peeling and slicing, but thanks to a video editing program, you get to see my lightning knife dispatch it all in about one minute. (Yes, I still have all my fingers!) Johann Sebastian B. provided the accompaniment for the frantic first half of the film; his Goldberg Variations are often mislabeled a lullaby, but there’s nothing soporific about this selection. In the second half, the verdant opus is composed on a canvas consisting of a shining bowl. It proceeds smoothly to the strains of Schubert, performed by an eight-piece ensemble in which my cousin-in-law Tom Morrison is the bassoonist. Altogether in less than three minutes you see an afternoon of effort that provides almost a week of healthy and delicious nutrition.
“Eat this salad twice a day, and your pounds will melt away.”
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