Salad Days

Too hot to cook. Almost too hot to eat. So salads have become a staple for dinner. Salads have come a long way since I was a child. In those days, it was usually cut up tomatoes and iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise. Since we lived in Georgia there was also shrimp salad which I loved, at least the way my mother made it with mayonnaise.

When WWII came along and my father had the back yard plowed up and put in a "Victory Garden" we started having home grown leaf lettuce with oil and vinegar(probably Wesson Oil and Mott''s apple cider vinegar) along with spring onions and tomatoes from the garden. Mother rubbed the salad bowl with a clove of garlic for a continental touch. Of course, during the winter, it was back to lettuce and tomtoes with mayo. And, of course, tuna salad with onions and pickle relish and mayo. There was also apple salad, with raisins, celery and the inevitable mayo. Sometimes Mother would make her own mayo with oil, eggs and lemon juice. It was delicious. We were big on mayonnaise. One of our favorite grilled sandwiches was peanut butter and mayo - on white bread, or course.

But I digress. The subject is salad. How did we live without a gazillion kinds of greens, olive oil, feta, sunflower seeds, sliced almonds or pecans, kalamata olives, oregano or dill, balsamic or wine vinegars, shredded mozzarella, Parmesan, fruits, raw vegetables, bacon or diced chicken, or all the other things we can make a big whole meal salad from? It will be nice to get back to a cooked meal eventually, but for now salads are great. I had lunch (a BLT) at Ray's today with some women from my aerobics class and one of them is going to bring me a recipe tomorrow for a great sounding couscous salad. Who ever heard of couscous back in the old days? Outside of a souk in Morocco?

Food, glorious food, salad-wise!