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It’s only natural that after getting fresh produce from our CSA for several weeks, after the beginning of the harvests from our garden and after being put on a medically prescribed low-carb diet that my world is beginning to revolve around salads.

For a while, I have been a connoisseur of restaurant salads. You can tell a lot about a restaurant by the salad offerings. Of course, the greens used are the primary indicator of the level of the restaurant. There is a basic expectation that an above-diner level restaurant will use something other than iceberg lettuce (besides the wedge salad which seems to be coming back in vogue) and indicate what kind of greens on the menu. But then there is another level of salad that evidences certain ingenuity in finding the right combination. You never know when you will find that different but perfect salad, could be a hole in the wall place or the fanciest restaurant. This ingenuity is a art form that is somehow best expressed in the french term for tossed salad, salade composee.

Until the present, while I had left my mother’s iceberg-cabbage-green pepper salads behind (sorry mom), I still had a felt that I lacked some talent in putting together a salad at home without a recipe. Our salads at home would often be lettuce and tomato with an occasional cucumber. Faced with more options at the food court, I would often pick a random assortment of toppings and then be dissatisfied with the result. It went further downhill when I came to Emory since their self-serve salad bar somehow just turns my imagination off and does less for my appetite. They finally started offering baby spinach but their romaine lettuce always looks rather mangy and I never make it past the beginning of the line. But the recent restriction on my carb intake (think diabetic) has thrust me into a new place with salads.

I’ve begun to think of lettuce as the all-purpose base for whole culinary worlds, replacing the bread or pasta with lettuce for the canvas. My Cook’s Illustrated Best 30-minute recipe book has helped me by reminding me of some dinner salads and cooksillustrated.com has helped with good tuna salad recipes (which can be eaten on anything) and the beet salad. Cook’s Illustrated had proved their salad ingenuity to me actually with their fruit salad recipes. Recognizing that fruit salad is often a haphazard affair, they came up with some amazing pairings that are designed for eye appeal as well as for the marriage of flavors. I’ve made their strawberry grape salad with red wine-balsamic reduction (which tastes like chocolate!). I’ve been lusting after the nectarine-blueberry-raspberry salad with champagne-cardamom reduction and the plum-fig with brandy-cinnamon reduction, but alas fruit, alcohol and sugar are restricted in my current diet.

Here are some of the salads we’ve recently eaten (or are going to eat):

Tuna salad with balsamic vinegar and grapes on lettuce
Taco salad
Salad with grilled beets, fried shallots and goat cheese
Italian chef’s salad salad with fennel, roasted red peppers, artichokes, salami and parmesan (this was not as great, mostly because I discovered that I don’t like artichokes)
Salad with sausage and white beans
Chef’s Salad
Salad with roasted veggies and italian cheese salad (from whole foods)
The usual everything must-go salad (hold the beets)
Tomato salad with fresh mozzarella and pesto (again from the garden)

The other day, I finally developed a smidgeon of that ingenuity I’ve been looking for, since the above were mostly inspired by recipes in some form. This ingenuity was facilitated by an accidental discovery of the pairing of ham with caesar dressing a few days earlier. My chef’s salads always seemed to evoke the epitome of how my salads were random mishmosh dissatisfactions. And then as I was preparing the ham for lunch, I had a stroke of genius. I blanched some fresh green beans from the garden (since we didn’t have enough for two for dinner and I didn’t want to squander their freshness by waiting for some more) and threw them on the salad with my ham with caesar dressing stolen from the food court to be added later. My salad sense in full effect, I decided to pass on the tomato, feeling that its addition would ruin the combination.

I’ve been thinking, if I get really good at this, I could open a salad restaurant. This would be fundamentally different from the saladworks type places where you select the toppings and they allow you to indiscriminately throw things together. I would rather be offered suggestions of salads composed with aplomb that surprise and delight. This salad restaurant would offer appetizer, dinner and dessert/fruit salads plus daily specials. This would be on the order of Joe’s (or Lulu’s) Pie Diner in the recent movie Waitress where they serve pies of sweet and savory varieties and the special is thought up daily by the resident pie genius, Jenna. One of the motifs of the movie is a shot looking down on a pie being made with Jenna’s voice-over explaining the inspiration for the pie and its ingredients. She daydreams about pies in reaction to the events in her life. “Pregnant Miserable Self Pitying Loser Pie… Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambé of course” or “Earl Murders Me Because I’m Having An Affair Pie… You smash blackberries and raspberries into a chocolate crust” or “I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong And I Don’t Want Earl To Kill Me Pie… Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana.” Some day I’ll have that kind of genius applied to salads. Or I’d settle for someone else opening up such a salad restaurant where I could eat new salads every day. Anyone interested in opening a restaurant?