Yes, salad. We are all told that we should toss a healthy salad several times a week at home as an appetizer to dinner. The intelligentsia set amongst us also know that we can serve the salad after the entree as a sort of light refreshing course to end the meal and aid in digestion. Recently my wife and I followed a vegan diet for the course of three weeks. (Okay, there was a couple swordfish steaks that I couldn't resist at Whole Foods one day.) However, it was a valuable lesson in what I call the "diminishing returns" of the palate.
Often when I am making a sandwich, and I am trying to cut calories, I amp up the acidic components such as mustard, vinegar, pickles, peppers, etc. However, when I put cheese on the same sandwich, I noticed I didn't really taste the cheese as much because it wasn't the focus of flavor anymore. In fact, I was just eating the calories of the cheese but pretty much tasting a whole bunch of giardiniera. Hence, I learned to leave out the cheese. But I digress, back to diminishing returns, actually that was what I just got done explaining. Maybe I didn't digress after all. The takeaway point, is that I learned that I didn't miss cheese as a component of many dishes, it had diminishing returns if it wasn't the focus of the overall flavor profile. Many times, we are eating calories that are not "paying out" in terms of the sensation that we are reaping on the tongue. I do however still tremendously mourn my ritual of snacking on Brie and baguette while I am cooking dinner. So, if you are using high calorie components that are merely playing quiet background music in your cooking, cut it out!
Another thing that I observe when trying to rein in my diet is how many healthy foods I observe in deli cases at the finer grocery stores: wheat berry salads, blanched kale with sesame oil, fresh fruit salads, cold whole-grain noodles with peanut sauce and cabbage, etc. I always think to myself that if I had the time to make all that stuff, I'd be much healthier chap. Okay, now this post has turned into three main points: 1) Diminishing Returns: What is the flavor payout as a ratio to amount of calories? Mustard has a very high payout, excessive oil may not. 2) If my refrigerator looked like the deli case at Whole Foods, I'd probably be thinner due to never having to rely on "quick" or "cheater" snacks like chips, crackers, etc. and now my original point which I still haven't gotten around to yet: 3) Salads should focus on lettuces some of the time, not ad nauseum, ad infinitum. I realize that stocking the fridge with healthy salads can be both time consuming and expensive. Such is the fact that we live in the only country in the world where processed foods are cheaper than their healthier counterparts. (Thank you US government for accidentally creating this phenomena by subsidizing corn production.)
To my original point, I made a lovely Farro and Roasted Butternut Squash side for dinner last night. You can read the recipe here. I'm not going to repeat the recipe because you can link to it and read it for yourself. However, we are going to talk about this in just a little bit more detail: Is this an entree, a side dish or a salad? It is, in fact, all three. Served with a side of vegetables, it is easily a lovely dinner in its own right. I put it on the side of a roasted chicken, a lovely side dish. Now if any of you know me well, you know that I cannot cook a recipe without diverging from it, at least a little bit. I left out the goat cheese and added dried cherries. Yes, even though the vegan diet is over, I am trying to eat a more plant based diet. Besides, I think it improved the recipe immeasurably by leaving out the tang of cheese and adding the tang of cherries.
So now, we are going to return to my three main points listed above. 1) I decided that the goat cheese would have diminishing returns. Yes, it may add a little bit of tang, but it would be overpowered by the other strong flavors present, walnut oil, farro, roasted onions. Calories without a lot of return. I should also mention here that I recently bought a lovely bottle of walnut oil and it's changing my world. 2) My refrigerator needs to resemble a deli case so that I have lunch for the following day. So, I followed the original recipe to cook enough to have leftovers. But here now is how we morph a hearty side dish into a salad, I added a splash of tarragon vinegar to lift the flavors and change the flavor profile so that it would taste good cold. Voila! 3) Salads need to stop being leaves. Clearly, this salad doesn't have a leaf near it, however, if you had this farro salad left over and needed to stretch it and serve it as an appetizer to a crowd, you could easily cut up a hearty romaine and toss it in, tasting for seasoning to ensure that the salad still has the right balance of oil, vinegar, and salt. If you learn one thing, I hope that when you look in the refrigerator and see that you are out of spring mix, you turn to your pantry and wonder to yourself what you can do with chilled, cooked lentils, beans, grains, and other clever things. There is a world of salad beyond just leaves, and I don't mean potato salad.
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