I'm still a salad girl. I still consume a lot of salad. The one I love right now the most is from the pool club snack bar. House Salad. It consists of crispy wet iceberg lettuce, grated carrot, a lot of shredded cheddar cheese, sweet cucumber cubes, grape tomatoes, and the greasiest home made croutons you've ever seen. I take the croutons off the salad first thing, and pile them on the red plastic tray. My daughter and I eat them long after the salad is finished. The House Salad dressing is some Italian that is smoother and more puckery than anything I can come up with at home. Red wine vinegar, oil, herbs. It comes separated into two layers, gold and pink, in little plastic ramikens with tops on.
Sometimes I get a scoop of tuna salad on top of my house salad. Tuna salad has replaced leafy salad as my staple.
At home I make my own: solid white albacore in light vegetable oil, with a blob of mayonnaise, a scoop of sweet hot dog relish, and a sprinkling of dried cranberries. I figure out that the trick to delicious tuna salad is to stir it for a really long time. I pile my tuna salad on a slice of wheat bread, and bake it in the oven with a thick slice of jarlsberg on top.
Out in the world, I order it take-out from a cafe in town. Exactly as described in the title. Sometimes the owner asks if I want my regular.
When I was a teenager my best friend and I marveled that my mom sustained herself on a diet of fish stick sandwiches and gin and tonic. She ate exactly one sandwich at lunch time every day, for what I recall being the entire decade of the 1980s. She didn't eat much else. The occasional block of Cadbury Fruit and Nut from the freezer door. So it was a kind of wild moment a few months ago when I realized what I had become. If I skip my tuna salad for a day, I crave it like a feral cat.
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