Salad Days of Spring

No, I actually use a real brush, but I would totally borrow
that cat if I could. Bob *has* climbed in the toilet a few
times, but he hasn't curled up for a nap or posed for a toilet
cleaning meme, and he's only bothered to flush once. Ingrate.

My mother and I co-habitate, which is pretty awesome for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it sets a very low bar for personal accomplishment. When you're 45 and you tell people you live with your mother, certain assumptions get made, and pretty much anything you say thereafter, from "I published a poem today" to "I cleaned the toilet" outperforms those assumptions handily. I like to under-promise and over-deliver.

One of the other minor things I enjoy about living with Mother is salad. I occasionally like a good salad with my dinner. Eleanor is meh on salad with dinner, since she takes them to school for lunch every day. Betty occasionally eats salad, a very particular kind of salad called Marinated Cucumber Salad in Tangy Vinegar Dressing (i.e., pickles). Sometimes, she will add tomatoes, carrots, or even non-marinated cucumbers to her salad, but that just dilutes the essence of the dish. Bruce finds most vegetables troubling and has a deep dislike of condiments. He considered trying salad last month, but once he saw the lettuce lying there on his plate, looking all green and fresh, he reneged and the matter has not been brought up again. So, before Mother joined our household, salad was pretty rare with dinner.

Now, however, I have another salad-eater in the house, and on the 50% of the days on which we have a formal dinner (i.e., when the kids are here), I have full license to get creative on my salads.

See? It says salad dressing right
there on the label! 

Creative salad making is not something I learned at home. I vividly remember my dad's idea of salad, because we ate it every time I visited him. It consisted, invariably and exclusively, of the following ingredients:
1. Tomatoes
2. Cucumbers
3. Onions
4. Raisins
5. Miracle Whip 

I also vividly remember my dad's idea of breakfast (1 tall glass: half milk, half orange juice, and 1 raw egg). The memories are vivid, in much the same way that my memories of that one gas station bathroom in West Texas in 2013 are vivid: oddly aromatic, gross, slimy, and lumpy, although Dad's cooking had, generally speaking, fewer flies.

Mother makes tasty salads, but she doesn't experiment much. From her salad making, I took a fondness for radishes and feta cheese. We disagree on Thousand Island Dressing, which, as best I can tell, is Miracle Whip and Ketchup mixed together and therefore suitable only for hamburgers, but her traditional base ingredients (romaine lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, onions, green olives, and feta cheese) have become the base ingredients of my salads as well.

Ironically, it was Dad and his raisins that opened the door to creativity. For a long time, I took Mother's base salad, added raisins and ranch dressing, and called it a day. Then raisins led to dried cranberries, probably because we were out of raisins, which led to a revolutionary thought: what if you put non-dried fruit in a salad? These days, I will generally toss in whatever's in the fruit bowl on top of the base salad: diced apple, cut up Cutie oranges, sliced strawberries, grapes...even the last couple of pieces of cantaloupe once. Nuts are another favorite. Currently, I am using some tequila lime flavored sunflower seeds, but we are big fans of roasted nuts, so I've been known to raid the nut jar (which looks suspiciously like a cookie jar because it is...we keep our cookies in Tupperware). I've also been experimenting with flavored olives.

Where is the artistry?
The pride in craftsmanship?
WHERE IS THE RADISH?

I enjoy the creativity of raiding the fridge (and the fruit bowl and the nut jar) and making something different every day. I've also found that I no longer enjoy eating salads at restaurants for the most part, because they just take the Dole Iceberg Mix, put a cherry tomato on it and douse it in ranch. If you're lucky, you get a stale crouton and a slice of slightly mushy cucumber that's starting to go off. One exception is the Strawberry Pecan Salad at Longhorn Steakhouse. 

Salad of the Gods.

The other exception is that, if there is a salad bar, I am irresistibly drawn to beets and pickled okra, even though, rationally, I know that they just took these things out of cans and dumped them in their little ceramic containers and that I could probably go to Wal-Mart and get both of these items for less than $5. I will freely admit that I don't mind taking the kids to Gattiland primarily because I know the salad bar contains pickled okra. One of the trainers left a jar of homemade pickled okra at the office around Christmas time. Theoretically, it may have been for sharing. We'll never know.

So, today I got a couple of poems published, cleaned the toilet AND made a fabulous salad for dinner! Expectations: SHATTERED.