A Salad and a Story

Most of our salad leaves come from our garden, and I am so grateful for that. But if I walk into a local organic store and see greens that are still look fresh, with a bit of soil hanging on, they come home with me. I have a rough idea of what type of salad they will trun into. It’s there but not fully formed yet. And then somewhere around noon the next day, I stare at those leaves and inspiration hits and they turn into a wonderful start to a lazy lunch.

We eat salad at lunch, hardly ever at dinner. Leaves at night sit in the stomach and argue with you. At noon they enhance digestion for everything else you will eat. At least this is what I believe.

Buy leaves thrice a week

Most people give up on salads for one boring reason. They buy a week's worth on Sunday and by Thursday the bag contains something slimy and apologetic.

Buy twice or thrice a week. Small quantities. It costs the same and you will actually eat it.

What survives our weather reasonably well: crisp lettuce rather than the floppy butterheads, rucola if you can find it, baby spinach, tender methi picked young before it turns bitter enough to remove paint, and pudina (mint). Coriander goes on top, not at the bottom. If there is a farmers' market anywhere near you, go once. You will never again be able to pretend that a leaf in a plastic clamshell under a tubelight is the same thing.

For two people, about 150 grams of two ro three different types of leaves. Four people, double it, and add a fourth kind of leaf for variety. Your tongue will thank you.

I don’t use anything tinned. I don’t remember the time I used bottled dressing, or sweet corn out of a can, or pineapple rings in syrup. All of it tastes faintly of the metal it lived in. If you cannot get it fresh, leave it out. Nobody at the table will come looking for it. I make an exception for sliced olives that come in a glass bottle, swimming in brine. Those are fine.

Wet leaves ruin everything

This is the step everyone I know in India skips.

Fill a large vessel with cold water. Drop the leaves in and leave them five minutes. Do not run them under the tap, the grit just goes for a swim and settles back down. In still water the sand sinks. Lift the leaves out with your hands instead of pouring the water off, and look at the bottom of the vessel. That fine layer of mud was going to be in your teeth.

Rucola and baby spinach bruise if you handle them like laundry. A gentle swirl, that is all. Sturdy lettuce can take a proper shake.

Then dry them properly. A clean cotton cloth, leaves in a single layer, patted, then rolled up loosely in the cloth and put in the fridge. They stay crisp for close to a week, and the dressing sticks. Oil and water refuse to talk to each other, so a wet leaf sheds the dressing straight to the bottom of the bowl, where it waits in a small sad puddle for whoever is eating last.

The best thing to use is a salad spinner. You can get it off amazon and these days they are quite cheap. You put the wet leaves in the spinner and push the knob or pull the string a few times, the container inside spins and the water simply drains off with centrifugal force. You will have lovely dry leaves in minutes.

Why it’s called a dressing

The dressing is the heart of a salad. People who never eat salad get addicted when they taste one I have made. This is the one bit where knowing something helps.

Three parts oil to one part acid. Six tablespoons of olive oil to two tablespoons of acid feeds four. I use vinegar and lemon together, roughly a tablespoon of each. Vinegar gives depth, lemon gives brightness, and on its own each one is a bit flat. I have written this for any of you who want measurements. For me, I take a glass bottle, pour in a few glugs of very good quality olive oil and squeeze in the juice of one entire lime. Lemon is hard to get in India, but if I do manage to get my hands on lemon, then I use half a lemon. And add in about 1-2 teaspoons of vinegar. I rotate the vinegar I use. Sometimes it’s red wine, other times it’s rice, and sometimes it’s the apple cider vinegar. If a bottle catches my fancy I get it and use it and see if I like it.

Salt goes into the acid first and gets stirred till it dissolves. Salt will not dissolve in oil. Put it in at the end and you get crystals scattered about, one bite of the salad screaming, the next one bland.

Then the things that wake it up. One pod of garlic, crushed under the flat of a knife and dropped in whole so it perfumes the dressing without anyone getting a mouthful of raw garlic. A quarter teaspoon of mustard, paste or freshly crushed seeds, which is what actually holds the oil and acid together. Half a teaspoon of honey to take the edge off. All this into that glass bottle. Lid tightly on and shake for thirty seconds and it goes pale and slightly creamy. The lid tightly on is important. I found that out once when it was not, and I realised why it is called a dressing.

I trust my instincts with the dressing. I don’t taste it. I just use it.

But if you are feeling doubtful and have to taste it, then taste it on a single leaf. Not off a spoon. A spoonful of dressing tastes far too strong and you will start pouring in more oil to fix a problem you do not have. Dip one leaf, eat it, and in two seconds you know whether it wants more salt, more lemon or more oil.

The ingredients

Greens, for a big bowl serving two to four

• 150 to 300 grams mixed leaves, washed and dried
• two or three kinds only, not five

Dressing

• 6 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 pod garlic, crushed
• 1/4 teaspoon mustard (optional)
• 1/2 teaspoon honey (optional)
• Salt and black pepper (many people love pepper, I tend to skip it completely)

Worth owning

A decent olive oil. It can be expensive. Put a drop on your tongue and it should taste of something. One bottle of vinegar, apple cider or plain red wine, and it will last you months. And salt worth its money, flaky or a good rock salt, since it is doing most of the flavouring here.

Toppings, by what they do

Stop thinking of toppings as ingredients. Think of the job you want done.

Something crunchy: cucumber, thin slices of raw carrot, roasted peanuts, toasted almonds or walnuts. Seeds.

**Something sweet: **pomegranate, chopped apple, ripe pear, orange segments, grapes cut in half, cranberries.

Something rich: avocado, paneer or tofu cubes, crumbled feta if you can get hold of good fresh cheese. Skip if you are vegan, for this salad you don’t loose anything.

Something salty: olives from a deli counter rather than a jar, a sharp cheese grated over the top, vegan works well.

**Something spicy: **nothing beats jalapeños or you could roast red and yellow bell peppers, skin them and chop them chunky.

Something healthy: any type of micro greens.

Pick one or two or all. One or two are subtle and get the attention they deserve. Put all of them in and each bite becomes a surprise. If you like surprises this is the way to go. Personally, I do.

And if all you have is leaves and dressing, that is still lunch. Do not skip the salad because the fridge is short of a topping.

My salad story

I was a person who never ate salad. Ever. Not even the sad little leaf in a burger in a restaurant. That would be fished out and left on the plate.

Once I was travelling with Gurudev and we were at our beautiful German ashram. I would normally get to eat with Gurudev, and the food was tasty and wholesome. It was an arrangement I loved, especially the eating with Him. Then one day He looks at me and says, "I have never seen you eat salad." I said, "Yes, Gurudev, I don't like salad. I don't eat it."

"How are you going to survive in Europe if you do not eat salad?" He said. He gestured to someone on the side and said, "Get him a big bowl of salad." And a big bowl of salad appeared before me, and everyone in the room now is expectantly waiting for me to eat it. I tentatively took one bite of a leaf. I had the feeling that I was a rabbit. It tasted surprisingly good. I took a few more leaves and put them in my mouth. This was pretty good. Before I knew it, I was in love with salad. In fact, Gurudev made sure that I was addicted to salad. For the next 15-20 days that I traveled with Him, He ensured that I had salad for lunch and for dinner. And by the end of the trip, I had no choice but to enjoy salad.

When I land in a place where I am staying at someone's home and there is nothing in the kitchen cupboard I recognize, and I don't even know the language to read the labels on the bottles. I know that I can toss a salad for myself following the exact recipe above, and whatever happens to be in the kitchen becomes toppings. I just go by the smell!

What those kitchens taught me is that a recipe is a set of proportions, not a shopping list. Once you know oil and acid sit at three to one, and that salt dissolves in the sour part, and that you want one thing with crunch, you can walk into any market on earth and come out with lunch.

Somebody in Bulgaria once gave me a bottle of pumpkin seed oil. Dark green, thick, and it made a dressing I have never been able to reproduce here. I tried for a while. Then I stopped trying. Some things belong to the place they came from.

Standing at the counter, tearing leaves

Tear the leaves, do not cut them. A knife bruises the edges brown within the hour, and anyway tearing is nicer to do.

Pour the dressing round the sides of the bowl, not into the middle. Then toss with both hands. Actual hands. Lift from the bottom, let the leaves fall, turn the bowl, again. Salad servers are useless, they crush half of what they touch. Your hands can feel when every leaf is coated.

It takes two minutes, and the taste will linger long after lunch is done. And if you have guests over, they will say, "What was in that dressing again?"

I have been telling people to meditate for a few minutes for over thirty years. They nod very sweetly and go back to their phones. So begin here instead. At the counter, with the leaves, with your hands slick with dressing. Then sit down and eat what you made without a screen in front of you. Do this much and maybe meditation will not seem like such a strange idea.

Eat the salad with your hands. I used to look down at Dinesh when he did that, until I did it. Now I seriously question the point of a spoon and a fork. Finally, if you are like Dinesh who likes everything a tad spicy, try the above with some peanut powder (sheng daanya chi chutney). The Maharashtrian in you will not be dissapointed.