“I live for a good house salad,” writes Jessica Merchant, based in Pittsburgh, in her new cookbook Easy Everyday Eventay, who love this month. “For some reason, a few years ago I obsessed with the idea of having an exclusive house salad. An incredible and tasty green salad … that plays wonderful with almost all recipes.”
Isn’t it a fun idea? His own house salad, he explains, has vegetables, carrots, tomatoes, onions and crutons, in addition to two prominent: Asiago cheese and sunflower seeds.
While reading Jessica’s kitchen book, I realized that my friend Liz Libré has a house salad. For more than a decade, she is doing the arugula with a lemon vinaigrette. (We have just talked about that on his 2016 house tour!) “Griffin, five years old, is the biggest salad dining room in our house due to dressing,” he told me at the time. “It always has seconds.” Now the 14 years, he still loves. (The dressing recipe: “I never measure, but it is basically a good amount of oil and champagne vinegar, half -lemon juice, one or two chopped garlic cloves, a little dijon mustard, a little mayonnaise and salt and pepper”).
In addition, I told myself with a heart stab, my dad has one (in the photo above). “Mine is very basic,” he told me on the phone this morning, laughing so much that he was asking for his recipe. “I like diverse color tomatoes, I always have fungi and, usually, a mixture of peppers, and I will avocado, if the avocados are good.” Sometimes the dressing is made (“mainly olive oil, mustard dijon and balsamic vinegar, I only take away and that is my dressing, we used to do it in France at lunchtime, it can be very spicy if you put a lot of mustard”); Other times, it goes with the expressions of Newman or garlic (“rebound”). He has made the salad a million times for us, and estimates that he has eaten it “probably every two days, boring, huh?” Then laugh again.
Would you have (or would you) a house salad? I am in the idea.
PD: A trick for better salads, five salads without lettuce and the magic of the candles.