How do you like your salad dressing?

I remember the salad dressing my mother used to make for the family. It was very simple. Fresh cold pressed virgin olive oil from Lebanon, a few drops of half a fresh lemon, a pinch of fresh mint, salt and pepper and there it was. And our salads at the time, it seems like a lifetime ago, consisting of crisp, fresh green salad, delicious fresh tomatoes and crispy little cucumbers, and spring onions! Preparing the salad was quick, easy, tasty, fresh and super healthy. Fresh salad was part of our daily diet. The little cucumbers were so delicious that we ate them like a fruit. My favorite growing up was a feta cheese sandwich with pita bread and cucumber.

Years later in the western world I discovered all the ready made salad dressings, in England it was Heinz Salad which had a thick creamy texture of mayonnaise and I developed a liking for that for a while. In Switzerland I developed a taste for the thick, creamy salad sauce that they love to serve here, still today. Italians love vinegar instead of lemon, especially balsamic. Today, when I go grocery shopping, I am amazed at the variety of ready-made salad dressings available and wonder how healthy that is, considering that to stay fresh for so long in the bottle on the shelf, you have to add a lot of additives.

I have an Australian friend who makes his salad dressing in bulk and stores it in his fridge for the week. The ingredients are olive oil, vinegar, mustard, mayonnaise, dried herbs, salt, pepper and cream! It tastes good, I must admit, and I tried it for a few weeks, but gave it up because I couldn’t stand to eat the same salad dressing all week. Another Hungarian friend makes an interesting fresh sauce, she adds sunflower seeds, zucchini seeds, walnuts, to olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper, which is very much to my taste. A French bride would put her salad leaves in a cloth bag and shake it to get all the water out of them, which would end up dry, limp and not so crisp! My daughter, who is married to a French Swiss, has a small plastic container where she puts the salad and pulls a string to strain the water from the salad. Salad leaves don’t suffer as much, so it’s fine if you care about a few drops of water in the salad. Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered.

My niece, then a teenager, came to spend a few days with us. When she saw me preparing the salad sauce she was horrified, she refused to eat it saying that her mother made only one type of salad sauce, always the same and that she cannot eat another. She grew up to change her mind about it. Some people try to experiment with different types of salad dressings. I belong to this category. I love variety in life. So sometimes it’s with mustard, sometimes maybe with mayonnaise, sometimes with cream, sometimes with apple cider vinegar, which I’m told is very healthy, sometimes with balsamic which tastes delicious, but most of the time with fresh lemons. I like to add a variety of nuts, sometimes even raisins or cranberries. If the sauce is too thick and I don’t want to add oil or vinegar or lemon, I add a little apple cider or even a teaspoon of water. I always feel guilty when I do that, a flash of my French friends going to all the trouble to strain the water out of the salad leaves flashes through my mind.

My salads have gotten more creative and rich since I eat a lot of fresh vegetables, so seriously, my salad plate now also consists of raw vegetables, like avocado, broccoli, zucchini, celery, fennel, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, beans and whatever green veggies I can get fresh and crisp with lots of nuts. Sometimes I add fruit like grapes, pineapple, or apples. The mix always depends on what I have in the fridge and what is available in season. Every once in a while, when I have a freshly cooked hot meal, mainly baked or grilled vegetables or fish, I go back to my favorite original salad, just like my mom used to do, quick and easy.

Variety is the spice of life and the Creator loves variety. Is your life full of variety? It would be interesting if you were aware of what you are eating, what kind of salad dressing and what is actually in the ingredients. Is it healthy and is it good for you? Very often we get used to doing things automatically and spend half our lives unconscious. Ask yourself how aware you are of what you are eating. That would be a good start to becoming aware of your eating habits.

Among many other activities, Margo also likes to cook. She loves to experiment and she loves variety, always simple, uncomplicated, fresh and fast is her motto. She likes to put together quick and simple menus like Jamie Oliver, the famous young English chef who tried to change eating habits in America’s schools! As far as I can remember, it flopped because pizzas, fries, and pasta reappeared on the school kids’ menu by popular demand, shortly after she left. The very things that she wanted to banish, unhealthy foods!

Obviously I feel nostalgic. I feel guilty because I remember in a cleaning frenzy a few years ago throwing away my cookbook, handwritten in Arabic, over the span of 20 years, with recipes from my mother’s kitchen. I used to call her on the phone, she lived in London and I lived in Zurich, and she would give me the recipe on the phone and the instructions on how to do what. My young husband used to be appalled at phone bills! There was no internet back then, no i-phones, no sms, nothing, nothing! How do we manage? I can’t think how we survived without YouTube, Google, Amazon or Skype! So I think about the food, the way my mother cooked a dish, and I remember throwing that book out of my treasure chest, and I feel guilty every time, like I’ve betrayed my mother, and angry at myself for being so radical. about getting rid of old stuff. I don’t think he was that aware of what he was doing at the time. A big mistake that I can’t rectify.