Fresh crunchy green salad that stays fresh and crunchy, topped with all your favourites.
Gluten-free | Vegan, Veggie, or Omnivore
As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself.
I'm serious about the low-carb thing, for writing time. On the Summer of Writing workshops, the people yawning in the afternoons are always the ones who brought a sandwich for lunch. Top tip: don't bring a sandwich!
Salad is my most frequent writing-day lunch, especially when I'm writing outdoors. It's super easy to make a large salad earlier in the week, to serve as a side for a couple meals as well, and set some aside for my writing day. The fresh crunchiness is a joy, the toppings are a treat, and no sandwich-sleepiness to pole-axe the afternoon with drooping eyelids. That's me on my writing day in University Parks, exactly ten years ago, with my habitual Greek salad and its little jar of dressing.
To be yummy, though, the salad has to stay crunchy and fresh – so here are the secrets of making lasting salad. By nature, this post is more principles than recipe, but I'll add a recipe at the end for my favourite salad proportions and favourite dressing.
How to keep it fresh
The cardinal rule with keeping green salad fresh is don't put anything wet in it. As soon as the leaves and bits touch wetness, they'll start to slump and it'll lose its crunch within an hour, never mind several days. So that means...
- Dress it when you serve it: I make dressing in jars (which is handy for shaking them up to mix everything) and only dress the salad portions dished up onto our plates. For writing outside the house, I take a tiny jar of dressing with my salad.
- Deseed cucumbers: The seeds are the wettest bit, so without those, the rest of the cucumber doesn't wet the salad leaves so much. To deseed them easily, cut the cucumber in half lengthways, then scrape a spoon down the centre to pull the seeds out. It takes about twenty seconds.
- Don't add chopped tomatoes: They're wet wet wet. Either add chopped tomatoes when you serve it or use whole cherry / baby tomatoes.
- No mushrooms or apple or other wet food: Mushrooms
shrivel and go miserable and make everything else sad; apples go brown.
Fruit like orange segments are wet, so they're out too. Avocado goes
brown almost instantly and is wet.
- Keep it tightly sealed in the fridge: Find a tupperware the exact right size, so there's as little extra air as possible in the container. Don't push the salad down to fit it all in though - crushing the leaves will again hasten their softening. If you're making grab-and-go portions like my pic, you can portion it up when you make it.
- Take what you're having out the fridge: Fridge-cold salad is a bit meh, it's nicer if it's allowed to lose that edge of chill. If I'm writing at home, about half an hour before I eat, I take a portion out the fridge - either in its nifty serving container, or I dish some into a bowl and cover it.
With these strategies, a green salad can last very happily in the fridge for four days, without losing its lovely crunch.
You can also vary it by making a large salad base and then changing up the toppings. I often make a large salad base for the week on a Sunday or Monday night, with a base of romaine lettuce, deseeded cucumber, halved black olives, and red onion. That night we'll add feta and chopped tomatoes to make it a Greek salad, to go with moussaka; the rest often turns into a bacon & blue-cheese salad, for the week. (That's what I was portioning up in the pic at the top.)
What to put in the salad base
What you add is completely up to you, but here are some of the ingredients that are happy living in the fridge chopped up, as part of the salad base:
- salad leaves – I like the crunchier ones, romaine and little gems
- cucumber, deseeded
- spring onion
- normal onion, red or white, finely sliced
- red green and yellow peppers, finely sliced
- baby spinach
- sliced raw courgette
- celery
- mange tout
- watercress, rocket, etc
- small whole tomatoes
Adding toppings
Your salad base is a perfectly respectable green salad all on its own, but for a treat writing lunch, you want some joyous extra bits on top. These are some of my favourites:
- bacon and blue cheese
- bacon and avocado
- prosciutto
and blue cheese: prosciutto slices are very happy in the freezer and
then you can just pull out a few slices when you take the salad out to
de-chill. Because they're so thin, they defrost at lightning speed.
- Greek salad: feta and olives
- apple and walnuts
- other nuts / seeds sprinkled over
- croutons, because sometimes you want salad to hurt
And of course, a beautiful dressing makes a salad sing, so I've got my favourite recipe for that at the bottom.
My habitual "recipe" is below, but really, the principles here are the main thing, and the rest is following your heart and making an effort to treat your writer-self!
Recipe
Serving and times
Prep: 20 mins
Serves: 6-8 lunches depending on toppings
Ingredients
- 1 heart of romaine lettuce, chopped into inch-sized pieces
- 1 cucumber, deseeded (cut it in half lengthways and scrape a spoon down the middle)
- 1 small red onion, chopped into eighths and then sliced. (Shake it in a tupperware to separate the slices.)
- 1 jar black olives, drained and halved
- 300g baby tomatoes, kept whole
PLUS
- 1 block feta (200g), drained and chopped into cubes
OR - 220g Stilton, chopped into cubes, and 500g bacon, fried to crispy and drained on paper towel
Perfect classic French dressing
- 4 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 Tbsp lighter oil
- 2 Tbsp red-wine vinegar
- 2 tsp Dijon mustard
- 2 tsp caster sugar
- 1 garlic clove, very finely grated or crushed to a paste
- Salt and black pepper, to taste
I mash the garlic, sugar, salt, and pepper in the mortar and pestle to really crush the garlic, then add the mustard and mix that well, then scrape it into a jar, add the oils and vinegar, tighten the lid on the jar, and shake it well.
Happy writing and happy salad eating! And if you're hoping to bring your salad to a Summer of Writing workshop this August, there are still a few places left on Planning a Novel and Unravelling Secrets, and you can add your name to the waiting list for The Art of Short Stories, Living Characters, and Non-Human Characters. Full details and booking are here.
