Lettuce be a little posh
My children are suspicious of many things: early nights, rugby tackles, sugar-free ice blocks, Santa’s naughty v nice note-taking abilities, crotchety old cats, chopped nuts on icecream sundaes, Pixar villains and anything that looks like lettuce.
Whereas friends have spawned toddlers who willingly consume avocado and salmon sushi and carrot sticks served with hummus, my 5- and 3-year-old boys have taste buds as stubborn as they are sceptical. Unless it’s sweet, red and shaped like a strawberry, they won’t voluntarily eat anything vaguely vegetal. They have reluctantly conceded to sweetcorn (on the cob), carrots, peas and a carefully concealed smattering of diced capsicum (red, not green) in their spaghetti bolognese, but trying to make them eat salad is an exercise in futility. ‘‘It’s good for you,’’ I say, proferring a tiny portion of shredded iceberg with a single halved cherry tomato on top. ‘‘Just one bite,’’ I beg, presenting a buttercrunch boat in a tide of grated cheese.
Sadly, neither threats nor bribes have proved effective in loosening my offspring’s unco-operative chompers. They take one wary look at their plates, and one leery look at me – their nurturing, green-fingered earth mother – and recoil in horror, as if they’d busted me trying to poison them with a salad of rhubarb leaves and datura petals gently tossed with arsenic vinaigrette.
My children’s mistrust of mixed greens could be in their genes, for I’ve never been particularly keen on side salads myself. Despite my professional reputation as a self-sufficient homesteader with an expansive vege patch boasting half a dozen lettuce varieties, not to mention rocket, baby spinach, kale and any number of popular culinary herbs, I’ve always preferred my vegetables cooked. Perhaps that’s because when I was a child, Mum only ever made two types of salad: a standard lettuce salad with beefsteak tomatoes, boiled eggs, pickled beetroot and radishes, and another concoction known affectionately (and fairly accurately) as ‘‘that thing with tomatoes, raw onions and telegraph cucumbers drowned in malt vinegar’’.
It wasn’t until I got celebrity chef Peter Gordon’s latest book, Savour: Salads for All Seasons, that I realised my family’s been doing the salad a disservice all these years. Gordon uses everything from nuts to nori, fregola to Florence fennel, and papaya to pomello in his salad bowl; lettuce is far less welcome. It’s noticeably absent from almost all of his ‘‘elegantly plated assemblages’’ like minted baby potatoes with peas and creme fraiche, raw scallops with jicama, cucumber, seaweed and macadamias in passionfruit dressing, and miso and cacao marinated beef onglet with beans and soba noodles.
Personally, I would have categorised all of the above as meals rather than salads, but who am I to quibble with a man who thinks the best salads should also have an argumentative streak? ‘‘To create harmony,’’ writes Gordon, ‘‘you sometimes need to create a clash of some sort… the shock of a sweet roast grape that highlights sharp citrus notes, or fiery chilli used to enliven sweet mango.’’
I’m converted. Since reading Savour, I’ve made a posh salad (of sorts) every day this week. It started with a bowl of zucchini blossoms, their paper-thin golden petals stuffed with cre`me fraiche, chevre, chives and manuka honey then delicately dunked (okay, deep fried) in oil before being drizzled with a sweet and sour jam of tropical apricots (Dovyalis hebecarpa x Dovyalis abyssinica), progressed to caramelised baby beets in pomegranate molasses, and ended with a warm salad of Curious Croppers tomatoes and Clevedon Valley buffalo mozzarella from the local farmers’ market topped with freshly torn sweet Genovese basil and finely chopped shallots with crusty bread.
Before I read Gordon’s book, I would have called this moreish meal a margherita pizza, but from now on it shall be known as an eco-sourced, ethically farmed, sustainably harvested Neopolitan salad. My children scoffed the lot.
Whereas friends have spawned toddlers who willingly consume avocado and salmon sushi and carrot sticks served with hummus, my 5- and 3-year-old boys have taste buds as stubborn as they are sceptical.