working lunch

Jenny Lewis is so good. Jenny always inspires me and makes me feel kind of psyched about the world, and that is important in middle age. Also, the opening line of one of her albums is "I fell in love with a beautiful boy on the black sand." I like to listen to music while I work; hence the title of the post.

Here where I live, there are salad bars wherever there are offices (and artist studios). Is it this way around the country? Around the world? I like to imagine the salad bars I frequent are specifically New York-metro. The ingredients are frank. The salad tossers never judge.

This is the salad I have ordered over the past 15 years from salad bars in Times Square, Long Island City, Gowanus, and Newark.

• Spring Greens
• Shredded Carrots
• Grated Cheddar
• walnuts 
• dried cranberries
• egg
• chick peas

• salt (in Newark it is Himalayan pink, but I'm not picky)

• Olive oil
• Balsamic Vinegar

This is a protein packed salad. It is super filling on purpose. I suspect the reason a lot of people don't share in my salad enthusiasms is that they think a salad should be restrained. I reject this premise. Salad should be filling, delicious, and worth craving.

Some things I love about this salad: the oil binds the boiled egg, chick peas, and cheese into a delicious, pasty filling that works really well with the woodsy walnut crumbling between the molars. Especially when my dental work is up to date! The egg should be sprinkled with grainy salt. I love a good solid rough salt over my salad. The kind you can hear yourself chewing. The dirty sweetness of a carrot is occasionally eclipsed by the sugar-tart zap of the chewy dried cranberries. I literally scrape my plastic fork along the bottom of the clamshell to scoop up the residue.

I choose spring greens because they have that spicy, dirty, lettuce-y flavor.  And they are delicate to chew. Romaine in this case would be too crunchy -- combatively crunchy with the walnuts and carrots. Spinach is not my jam, unless cooked with paneer and cream and spices. At a frank NY-metro salad bar, there are no other greens on offer.

Coming Up Roses

I was young and wild once. Amazing to recall. And when I was 22, salad changed my life.

I alluded to this salad in a post from 2011, but have tiptoed around it since. This is it, the first. The great un-locker.

I don't know what to call this salad. The coming of age salad?

Let's call it the Coming of Age salad. 

Here is the recipe:

• spring greens
• the leaves of a large bunch of fresh cilantro
• walnuts
• mandarin orange segments (canned or fresh)
• Annie's Shitake and Sesame Dressing

Optional 

• buttered whole wheat wrap/tortilla

My brother introduced (this) salad to me, one night, visiting from Colorado, or Bend. He was recently vegan, and eager to share some of the delicious new foods he had discovered. He is the one who took me to the store and bought the ingredients and showed me how to pull the little cilantro leaves off of the bunch, stack them and slice them into tiny ribbons. He encouraged me to use a lot of cilantro -- the leaves of a big wet bunch.

That first night, I piled the salad onto a buttered whole wheat tortilla. I put so much filling on the tortilla that I had to compress the greens to wrap the thing up. I had to grip the wrap assertively to keep it from expressing its crispy innards. I remember every bite, viscerally. The tension of the buttery wheat bread breaking open, full of cold, crispy, slightly wet greens. The flavors were woodsy and tart and juicy. The textures were unusual; sluggy mandarin, candy sweet and mooshy. The walnuts, their thunky wooden crunch. Full of the strange and appealing essence cilantro flavor that just kind of delivers you to wherever your there is. Maybe it is hard to describe because it was an herbaceous salad. Isn't that a trendy food word. But yes, it was an ethereal salad full of earthy flavors -- mushrooms and walnuts and cilantro. If it weren't for the bright and colorful squish of canned fruit, I think it would probably spontaneously decompose its consumer, turn her into a wood-nymph. 

I had never before that evening stood at my counter top plucking, slicing, draining, and rearranging items from the grocery store into something that tasted quite that special. It was a turning point.

I made Coming of Age salad often that year, though I always rushed, inadvertently including the wooden stems of cilantro. I often overdressed it, by accident, hurrying through life. I blush to think of all the strange and magical evenings that unfurled as my belly was busy digesting Coming of Age Salad. I had moved to Portland in July of that year; on a lark, alone (well not really, I had my dog). I was an east coast girl. After I got there, following a six day drive, just me and dog, listening mostly to Bob Dylan and Nick Drake tapes, I made friends in strange places like Fred Meyer and the pizza place where I worked. I met Portland in a twilight violet haze of perfection.  Nick Drake was playing in the first coffee shop I visited. Portland and me were meant to be.

Thinking about those four years makes me wistful, and giggly, and slightly mortified. There were high highs and low lows. I was young and wild. Out of hundreds of potentially regrettable nights of fun and self-discovery, I particularly remember meeting Erica at a show at EJ's on 15th and Broadway when  I wore a knee length, triangle shaped skirt I had bought from the thrift shop on Hawthorne. I tucked into its waist a white button down shirt, and wrapped a scarf around my neck. On my feet I wore knee high black boots from Delia*s, made of some fake leather plastic.  I told my best Portland friend I was channelling and outfit I remembered from Fashion Plates.

I just did an image search and I found her:

* * *

It is not so easy as it seems to visit oneself 20 years in the past. To consider myself without my beautiful children and strapping, strong husband by my side gives me vertigo.

So many salads since that first night. Cilantro and walnuts were my gateway.