Leaf Peeper
I love me some leaves. A bag of spinach or rocket (but usually and) gets added to every trolley (rare), basket (common), or hand that does not have my phone in (most frequent) when I shop. Whereas an older generation made sure to get bread and milk, no matter what was already in the house, my generation (i.e. just me, I am what I am and what I am is a special snowflake, don’t @ me with your reductive classifications) buys bags and bags of leaves.
I emphasise the bags because 1) this recipe has a beef with that and 2) I am particular about my ‘washed and ready to go’ desire. I, like many people, had a stomach ache1 one time that I attributed not to excess or general illness, but that one bag of rocket that I got from the greengrocers that wasn’t washed, so I washed it, but I think I probably ate snail gunk2. Plus, no salad spinner = wet leaves. Wet leaves = wet plate = a hideous curse upon humankind. Don’t make me eat from the wet plate. It has wet on it!
I do sometimes get a couple of heads of baby gem, a butterhead if I‘m feeling old school (never an iceberg. That guy is as unfashionable as [spends seven to fifteen minutes going through T Swift lyrics until the realisation hits that I probably misheard something and it really doesn’t work], as, the Catholic Church. Yeah. Got ‘em), but that comes with an idea of an event meal. Something I will spend a bit of time preparing, so the washing and drying of the lettuce is no biggie, just part of the process.
If I expect to actually just eat green things though, then Imma want them pre-cleaned and pre-dried.3 I have gotten a salad spinner in the last few months, but I didn’t have it with me, and also, plus, it’s a step. And I want to eat lettuce, but I hate having to do more than literally nothing at all to get it in my mouth.
Why might people not want to buy fresh greens for a salad they’re throwing together?
Wet.
It was wet. I had to get ice-cubes, so many ice-cubes. That’s not a big deal when your freezer makes and stores them, but for me, that’s. That’s another step.
But Sohla recommends it, so they are washed, but still sparkle green and fresh and shit4. And the recipe, like the cucumber, is all - try it and see. What have you got in your fridge, your cupboard? Will that work? Try it. See.
Probs the most annoying part of this recipe is that I get it. I used bagged leaves for one of the meals (and probably one-third of my meals since the age of, I’m going to say nineteen? Anyone out there back me up? Was I eating bags of spinach in Amhra House? I can’t remember but mackerel and Tesco value cookies), and yep. It was fine. There were fresh herbs (coriander and parsley) I denied to wash, and you know, all fine. Good even. An unremarkable, but positive, salad. Something to go alongside the mealy tacos, but not detract from the beans5 I was making sure I included in a meal.
Then, I got some lil’ baby lil’ teeny lettuces. Still in a bag (of four), but with their flat white feet intact. And I broke off the leaves, put them in the ice bath, tried to dry them with the cleanest seeming towels I could find, thoroughly wet the floor of an apartment I could not bring myself to find a mop in, and since the rope that I had tagging along with me was right at the end, I prepared the “House Salad” to go along with some reheated leftover pasta and an onion I caramelised because. Because I bought an onion because it was a hwhite onion and then had to cook it, bin it, or bring it on a 10 + hour bus journey.6
It was really a “food’s ready” kind of dinner. No component was bad in and of itself, just a really weird mix. As a teenager, I was staying for a while at someone else’s house and they put all the week’s leftovers into a pan with some egg, and I ate it desperately trying to block out the week I was reliving. Those green beans, they were the day I arrived. And that mince, that was part of “no Elizabeth nooooooo”, thoughts drowned by the kindly Devil themselves. And maybe that generational trauma7 unfairly boosted the impact of the salad. But damn. Those leaves. Yes, a bit wet. But tasty af. Really, quite moreish.
So, okay, yes, once again, doing the whole thing is important. Short cuts (in the form of bagged leaves), will get you there. And mostly, that’s what I want/need/desire/don’t stop believing. But leaves fresh from the stalk-foot. Well. They’ll bring you on a journey. They’ll show you the sights. They’ll sit your mother down and get her asking for seconds.
Dammit, if I’ve not become a bit of a real-leaf peeper (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?).
Use ‘iffy’. Make a word with it. Make two. Then write about food. Go on. Dare you. ↩
Here is where I had a mega screed about food accessibility that I somehow deleted and so, (wait some of it is coming back: This is all a subtweet to an a question at an event I have not finished being angry with. How do we get people to eat salads [one: why do you need to? Get your face out of my fridge]? Ooh, people just haven’t had a good salad. [two: who? Who are these people? Are they fat? Is that it? Do you just want to get rid? I can hold the door, just come to me later, cos I’m hwhite] Don’t pretend that one magic recipe is going to rewire the Industrial Revolution, colonisation treating countries as bread baskets, constructed famines decimating smallholder farming, wage deflation, house price inflation meaning a two-job home is the minimum expectation, meat and dairy lobbying, a system that rewards lobbying and lobbyists, lack of community planning, so that households have no easy access to services and the best fruit and veg you can get in walking distance is a 25p banana [if you’re lucky. Not green, not ripe, just a clear bowl float above the granola bars and chewing gum] and some slimy carrots) let’s remind ourselves that Ctrl Z is not the saviour it purports to be and writing this in a word processor first is the type of sensibility that would bleed all sense from what I’m doing here. Think I nailed it tbh. ↩
Not actual shit ↩
Bean cameo! ↩
And yours is the life that is a sham until you can shout I am what I am. Apparently. Not even a particularly bad bus journey. No Feda O’Donnell, but no Bus Éireann to Limerick either. ↩
See earlier definition of generations. ↩
I did not get any of these symptoms, natch. Just yuck stuff! ↩