Salad days

Current mood: Green around the gills from salad overdose
Current music: Leonard Bernstein's 'Chichester Psalms' are doing the rounds... Large choirs singing in Hebrew, huge blaring orchestras, swinging in 7/4 time - can ya beat that?

I bought a salad takeaway for lunch today. It said on the box, 'Smoked Salmon & Potato Salad', so I thought, "Where's the harm?" Unfortunately for me, 'Smoked Salmon & Potato Salad' was an accurate description of only the top one-fifth layer of the contents of the box. I expected my potato salad to consist mostly of, well, potato, and I was somewhat dismayed by the size of the jungle underneath.

By 'jungle', I mean that large pile of green and maroon vegetative substance wot is not meant to be served raw (if at all), even if accompanied by a gallon of Thousand Island dressing.

The makers of this salad had cleverly concealed the vegetation underneath the salmon and potato, and slathered labels on the outside of the plastic box to obscure the view from the other side. The true depth of the problem cannot even be fathomed until one actually opened the box and turned the salmon over. Shock! Horror! What leviathans of green leafy vegetable await!

That's right, folks... I don't like lettuce. I suppose it's tolerable in small, controlled amounts, but not in enormous, hulking, threatening heaps of raw, green and red leaves, towering over the so-called 'key ingredients' like a parade of vengeful elephants over a herd of trembling mouse-deer.

Especially not when the lettuce leaves in question are starting to turn a bit brown and manky.

Do you expect me to believe that this is edible?

Picture from Seedquest.com

Actually, the lettuce (green or red) was quite tame compared to the rocket, which tasted blatantly bitter and bizarre. Whose bright idea was raw rocket? Ugh! It shouldn't even be allowed! In fact, in the US it's called 'arugula', which to me sounds less like a vegetable and more like a species of rare and highly toxic spider found in the rainforests of South America.

Rocket looks quite nice as a garnish. Just don't make me eat it

'Beetroot and Rocket' By Hoopoe. Picture from Worth1000.com

There may well be thousands of people who disagree with me, and in fact LOVE rocket from its delicate white roots to the tips of its wavy little green leaves. Maybe there are rocket appreciation societies, whose members hold rocket parties celebrating the vegetable, and play rocket games in which the aim is to wolf down as much rocket as possible in a minute. Well, I respect your view. I also decline your invitation to any such dangerous event.

I think that as far as salads go, lettuce should be relegated to 'Salad Optionals', a position usually assigned to croutons and bacon bits. (I also think that croutons deserve to be promoted to 'Salad Essential Accessories', but that's another story.) Uncooked rocket can be banned outright for all I care. My particular salad also contained a single black olive (I've not yet acquired a taste for them - too salty) and some mysterious green blobs with yellowish undertones, apparently called capers. I think they're some kind of pickled berry, though it's hard to be sure - they just tasted strange, and somewhat salty. Luckily, there weren't many of those.

The thing is - why does salad have to contain lettuce at all? Who decreed that Salad Must Contain Lettuce? Taking the definition of 'salad' as 'a cold dish of chopped vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, or other food, usually prepared with a dressing' (Dictionary.com), plenty of other, nicer vegetables can take the place of lettuce - potatoes, tomatoes, sweet-corn, beans, peppers and mushrooms, to name but a few. I'm quite happy with any of those!

You might say that I shouldn't have bought the salad, and should have made my own instead. Fair enough, that's a good point. If these weren't my salad days, perhaps I might've known better than to hand over my hard-earned cash. But hey, smoked salmon is always worth it. And the potato salad, whilst being woefully tiny in portion, was actually quite nice. And the little cherry tomato at the end was simply delectable...