Tofu Caesar with Double Honey Mustard and Chinese Noodles

This is a salad that absolutely changed my life:

• Romaine lettuce
• shredded carrots
• 4 x 2 inch slabs of dense, cheesy tofu (not cooked, but definitely denser and less slimy than the bricks you buy at the supermarket. I imagine they used extra firm tofu and then pressed out the moisture with paper towels before slicing, a trick I learned from my brother.)
• shredded Parmesan
• Chinese noodles
• 2 pours of low fat honey mustard dressing (I like a well-dressed salad.)

Procured from the salad bar at my gym.

I lost about 50 pounds eating this salad after vigorous workouts, on a near-daily basis, over the course of a year. At the end of the year, about 40 pounds into the weight loss, I met my husband.  It was June of 2002, in Manhattan. The ne plus ultra romantic time of my life. My husband fell in love with me at my very prettiest, which is special to me, though not exactly unorthodox.

I am not a fan of weight loss in general. Personally. Culturally. I am not of the cult of thinness, nor do I think women should waste any energy spiffing up the bod for objectification. However. . .

I lost 50 lbs that I had gained after quitting smoking two years before.  I replaced cigarettes with weed and snacked non-stop for 15 months, until, one day in August of 2001, a tiny red stretch-mark appeared to the left of my belly button. Quitting smoking is probably my proudest accomplishment, the thing that seemed most impossible before I did it. The fast weight gain and weight loss that followed didn't really phase me, though the numbers speak for themselves. I gained, then lost, a lot of weight.

The most notable thing about Tofu Caesar with Double Honey Mustard and Chinese Noodles is that it was so immoderately delicious and healthful, and so readily available, that I never felt like I was actually working to lose weight.  I would whip up to the gym from graduate school, bust my ass on the elliptical, and then eat my salad on the way back to school. Often I bought a second of the exact same salad for dinner or a late night snack. (After a few hours in my bag, unrefrigerated, the salad settled into a warm, wet mass. Just as delicious, but about half the size of the fresh version and much, much, more dense.)  I loved that salad. As with all of them, I can taste it now. My mouth is watering. Heavily dressed with tangy honey mustard, crunchy with carrots. The earthy, meaty tofu.

When something is so good for your body that you get used to how good you feel when you eat it, then when you think about that food the happy feelings are, like, not so much about the flavors, but are somatically rooted to your corpus. Its food-love on a whole other level. I loved some salads long before Tofu Caesar with Double Honey Mustard and Chinese Noodles, but no other delivered me from past to future in such dramatic fashion.

Also, everyone should fall in love in New York at least once.

A Note to Members of the Textiles Industry

Wouldn't my lunch salad look so good as a repetitive print on crisp white cotton and then turned into a dress or drapes or something?

This is basically Salad 2011 minus bacon, plus strawberry:

• spring baby lettuce mix
• shredded sharp cheddar
• sliced almonds
• whole avocado in cubes
• 2 large strawberries, sliced
• Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean burger
• raisins
• spicy brown deli mustard
• drizzle of honey
• olive oil
 

Who knew that strawberry and spicy mustard would be such a mind-blowing combination? Wow!

Lobster Salad (Cobb Style) ?!?

Okay, so this is a salad I would really like to try.

Bistro Laurent Tourondel (BLT Steak) serves it for lunch, but in my fantasy it is a dinner salad.

Literally, my heart races when I read the words: Lobster Salad (Cobb Style). I imagine romaine lettuce topped with hunks of cool, lemony lobster meat; room temperature avocado, sliced longways, and fanned out across the edge of the plate; thick cubes of maple bacon; some kind of creamy dressing. 

This is salad fantasy. Dinner with my husband on East 57th, on a warm summer night.

I would sip scotch with this salad.

Salad 1998 (these days are golden)

In 1998 I moved into the top floor of a house on a grassy lot overlooking I-5 in North Portland. There had been dogs in the apartment before it was mine, and it smelled noxious. Otherwise, the apartment was perfection. A bisected square. Four rooms with the staircase opening into the middle. Two windows on each wall.

In the first days I rented a carpet cleaner and washed the carpets four or five times. The next day, carpet still damp, I painted the walls of the living room barnyard red. It was a terrible, slap-dash paint job, but the color was good. Like, blood red. The apartment was sunny and bright. I bought yards of natural ivory-colored raw silk (charged, of course. I was crazy broke.) and nailed it to the window corners with little brads and let the ends fray. In that apartment was born Salad 1998:

• baby lettuces
• roasted red onions
• toasted walnuts that were dry and bitter, the skins of which often flaked off into the lettuce
• extravagant amounts of mild, snow-white chevre
• balsamic vinaigrette dressing that was strangely sweet and mild. I suspect now that it may have had more red wine vinegar than balsamic, though I never saw the recipe.

The ingredients of Salad 1998 came from the line at a restaurant where I worked.

At the end of my shifts, before the cooks broke down the line, I would pillage the little silver boxes of ingredients, filling a large plastic clamshell with my salad. I drove a classic car and I can remember its fumey, leathery smell. Driving home with one hand on the wheel and the other on the the plastic box of salad on the passenger seat. I remember the tinny creaky creaky creak sound of the clamshell rattling away. I remember the sound of the heavy, engraved buckle of the lap-belt clunking against the center console. I remember how the black leather passenger seat often looked: shiny, smeared with vinaigrette.

If there is any time and place to which I sometimes almost painfully long to return, it is this one. My little house. My wheels on the ground. My plastic boxes of salad. The tv I bought at the Salvation Army, that had a suitcase handle on top for easy carrying. The thunking dials of the tv. No remote control. No cable. No roommates.

One December night I moved the tv from my red living room into my bedroom and ate my salad in bed with my cat, who was dying. He was reeeeeaaaaaaaaallly old, and it was taking him days and days to give up the ghost. When I got home from work, he couldn't get up from his cozy spot on my pillow.  I wasn't sure what to do, so I moved my tv to my room and sat on the bed with him, watching the X-Files. It was our last night together. :/

I apologize for dive-bombing into such sad territory! This is what I mean to convey: when I think back on my salads, the big and small of life floods my memory.

Salad 2011 + Bacon, or The Devastating, Magnificent Now

This is a blog about salads. Joni Mitchell wrote, "everything comes and goes marked by lovers and styles of clothes." She left out "and salads." My most felt moments, highest highs, loneliest days, can be matched to the year's salad (effortlessly, immediately. The salad is the external and internal marker of my times.) Most years, by course of natural evolution, have salads of their own. Some salads persist across the years. Every job has a salad, as does every project. Every apartment has a salad. Every home, every house. My not quite three year old son has his own salad ("Salad without lettuce").  I look forward to the day my baby daughter has chosen her first.

The temptation is to start this blog at the beginning, the stealthy entry of salad into my digestive repertoire, but perhaps a non-sequential approach is best. I will say that my de facto relationship with salad began in 1995, in Portland Oregon, inclusive of a batch of fresh cilantro, walnuts, and a can of mandarins, and propelled by my then-vegan brother. A story for another day. Let's start where we are, in the devastating, magnificent now.

I ate today's salad, Salad 2011 + bacon,* at about 2:15 pm. The ingredients:

• Fresh Express (bagged, pre-washed, no doubt vitamin-free) Tender Ruby Reds lettuce
• Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean Burger, microwaved one minute
• one ripe avocado, room temperature, cut into 18 or so small cubes (9-12 cubes per half)
• grated sharp cheddar cheese
• 2 strips America's Choice pre-cooked microwaveable bacon*
• raisins
• thinly sliced almonds
• fat squirt of brown deli mustard
• olive oil
• tiny drizzle of honey

* I am a vegetarian who occasionally slides into bacon-love.

I prepare Salad 2011 by stacking everything on top of a super dense, tall stack of greens, in a deep ceramic cereal bowl, then lamely tossing as I eat. (I often get big mouthfuls of mustard between lettuce leaves, or an unexpected mouthful of raisins.)

Excruciating moments of mouthwatering deliciousness:

• when the crispy chips of honey-drizzled microwave bacon coat a cube of soft, creamy avocado
• each meaty bite of tender greens cemented together with gobs of spicy deli mustard
• the last bites, when the greens, avocado, and proteins are gone, and all that is left is an olive oil-coated trail mix of cool shredded cheddar, raisins, and almond slices. Washed down the last fork full with ice cold diet coke, out of a can. Heaven.

For every episode in my life since 1995, there has been a salad.  I will use this blog to tell you about them. My salads have changed my life. I think of each with fondness and wonder. I salivate at the thought of them. They have accompanied me through my somewhat erratic and, I like to think, indescribable youth, my intense career cultivation, friendships, engagement, and marriage. Strange ingredients have presented themselves during pregnancies. At other times, salads have made me healthy and thin. My salads have certifiably, slowly eroded my disordered eating. They've given me a culinary focal point. I have stood by my salads even when my Ayurvedic Nutritionist told me in 2001 that I was consuming too much raw food. And I will continue to savor each overstuffed bowl-full.

Each week I will share with you a salad concoction and a story, perhaps for your lunchtime reading. And I  look forward to hearing about yours.