Your Salad Is Sad. Here's How to Fix That.
Salad. If you’re like us you may have grown up with having salad as a side dish for your meals. What was in the salad? Iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, maybe tomatoes, maybe cheese, and the salad dressing of your choice (probably Ranch dressing or Kraft Thousand Island).
Salad wasn’t a meal, it was just some vegetables tossed into a bowl and slathered in salad dressing, designed solely so that you could say that you’ve eaten some veggies with your meal.
We’re here to tell you that salad can be much, much more interesting and tasty than that.
Per Wikipedia (the one true remaining source of truth and light online), “a salad is a dish consisting of mixed ingredients, frequently vegetables”.
That’s it. Mixed ingredients, frequently vegetables. All those corporate slop bowls you see popping up on your algorithm? Technically salads.
Why are we discussing salads? Certainly there are more interesting food things to discuss in these trying times. Well, we wanted to hop on the fibremaxxing trend.
If you’re old and have no idea what we mean by fibremaxxing, it means making sure that fibre is in everything you eat. Why fibre? Colo-rectal cancers are on the rise in young people world wide. Increasing your fibre intake can help stave that off.
🧑🍳 Mediocre Note: We’ve said it before, but get yourself checked with a medical professional if you have concerns. Colo-rectal cancer has affected the Mediocre Chef extended family, it’s a terrible disease. #ForYourHealth
Make it Filling With Protein 🍗
Protein is all the rage these days. It’s in everything. A lot of products have rebranded to just splash their protein content on the front of the packaging, without changing the amount of protein that was in it in the first place.
That being said, protein is important! It supports muscle growth and repair, keeps your immune system healthy, and more.
Here are some ideas of what to throw in for protein:
Chopped Chicken, Thinly Sliced Steak, or Shrimp
Hard Boiled Eggs
Chickpeas, Edamame, or White Kidney Beans (carbs and protein!)
Chopped Salami
Prosciutto (if you have prosciutto money in this economy)
Cheese
If you want to actually feel full after eating a salad, protein is non-negotiable. Skip it and you'll be hungry again in an hour — we speak from experience.
Crunch is Important 💥
You don’t want to eat a soggy bowl of slop, do you?
No, we didn’t think so.
The best way to avoid the soggy texture sensory problem is to include a little bit of crunch into your salad. Nuts, crunchy uncooked vegetables (like celery and bell peppers), and crunchy carbs are all good additions to help keep the sog factory at bay.
Say no to slop, say yes to crunch.
Add Fruit 🍓
Hey did you know that you’re allowed to add fruit to a salad without it becoming a fruit salad?
All recipes and dishes are about balance. Acidic and fatty, sweet and salty. If you have a particularly tart salad dressing (like one made using balsamic vinegar), you can probably add some fruit in to help balance it. We like: strawberries, blueberries (all of the berries, really), sliced pear, apple, or dried fruit like craisins.
Choose a Carb 🥖
There are so many carbs in this world and so little time. Don’t be scared of carbs, they help you feel full and are your body’s primary source of fuel.
Some of our favourite carbs to add in no particular order are:
Macaroni / Fusilli / Orzo / Penne
Croutons or Toasted Breadcrumbs
Quinoa or Couscous
Pita Chips or Tortilla Strips
Chickpeas or White Kidney Beans (carbs and protein!)
🧑🍳 Mediocre Tip: Crunchy bits like croutons, toasted breadcrumbs, pita chips, and tortilla strips are best left on the side and not incorporated into your salad. If you mix it all together and you plan to eat it throughout the week, the next day they’ll be a soggy sensory mess. Store them in a separate container and sprinkle them on top of your salad so they stay good and crunchy.
Don’t Sleep on Pickled Things 🥒
Pickles. (Gherkins for those of you in the UK, Ireland, or other commonwealth countries)
Pickled red onions or shallots are also dope.
Peperoncino or banana peppers.
Your favorite kind of olives (without the pit, of course).
That sorta thing.
PSA: But not all pickles are made equal, so choose carefully. (We learned this when we made this dill pickle bean salad. We didn’t have Grillo’s and gave a new pickle brand a shot. We should have used our tried and true pickle spears from Matt & Steve.)
Use Fresh Herbs 🌿
Herbs? Herbs. Don’t forget about ‘em. They add a bright layer to your salad!
Dill
Basil
Parsley
Chives
Mint
These herbs do so much to make a salad really pop. That’s it. That’s the pitch. Experiment with herbs!
CHEESE 🧀
A wise person once said:
“Life is great. Cheese makes it better.”
It adds fat, richness, and some saltiness (depending on the cheese). Cheese balances out acidic dressings and also adds a texture contrast amongst crunchy greens. Cheeses we like:
Crumbled Feta (could add goat’s milk cheese, if that’s your jam)
Grated or Shaved Parmesan
Shredded Cheddar
Fresh Mozzarella (especially in a Caprese salad)
Life is short, enjoy cheese. (Unless you’re lactose intolerant.)
🧑🍳 Mediocre Tip: The best cheese we ever had in a salad was fried cheese in a salad from Pip. We want to make this at home!
Don’t Skip the Dressing 🥗
If you’re a millennial like us then you probably have issues with food. Diet culture was prevalent growing up and skinny was in. As of writing this, skinny culture is back. We’ve come full circle, friends. GLP-1s are in and looking gaunt is fashionable—celebrities are removing their buccal fat.
But you know what? Happy people eat. And they eat their salad with dressing.
There are way too many people on the internet giving bad nutrition advice like: “SEED OILS ARE BAD!!!”. Do us (and yourself) a favor, if you have a lot of people in your feed sensationalizing food and using scare tactics, unfollow them.
Salad is still healthy with dressing. It’s better than NOT eating salad. Which, let’s be real, you’d probably only eat one or two naked salads and then give up on salads, because salads without dressing are sad.
Dressing is what makes a salad worth eating. Don't skip it.
Salad dressing bottles keep getting smaller at the grocery store — make your own salad dressing instead.
🧑🍳 Mediocre Tip: Only dress your big bowl of salad if you’re eating it all right away. If you're portioning out salad for meals, put the dressing on the side. Not because we want to portion control our salad dressing, but because dressing makes salad (especially the greens) soggy and gross. Help your salad stay crisp by adding dressing right at the end.
Salt Your Salad 🧂
You salt your steak. You salt your pasta water. Why don’t you salt your salad?
Adding salt is such a simple thing from making a salad go from good to great.
Our mediocre tip: add salt in layers.
Zaynab Issa in her cookbook, Third Culture Cooking, has an A++ recipe for a Halal Cart Salad that exemplifies this. She salts her chicken before cooking, sprinkles salt on her prepared tomatoes and onion so it can sit while the chicken cooks, adds salt to the dressing, and uses salted pita chips.
Salting in layers in small amounts makes every bite perfect.
Somehow this is still a relevant GIF.
Greens: Optional 🥬
Lots of salads start with romaine lettuce. But that can get boring real fast, even with all of the additions mentioned above. Experiment with arugula, spinach, butter lettuce, radicchio, kale, or cabbage. Pair them with a fresh herb.
🧑🍳 Mediocre Tip: Clean and dry your lettuce (or green of choice) with a salad spinner.
Or omit the greens entirely and have your base be a grain (like pasta salad) or have a bean-focused salad (#BeanTok is all the rage these days).
Salad Recipes We Like
Don’t want to wing it? Like instructions and being told what to do? Start here:
Spinach Salad with Smoked Chicken, Apple, Walnuts, and Bacon
Spinach Salad with Candied Pecans, Feta, and Balsamic Vinaigrette
Quinoa Salad Jars (all of Marianna’s recipes on TikTok are great!)
Bonus Recipe: Trevor’s Mom’s Pasta Salad
We first talked about it in our BBQ Party post (which we wrote eons ago).
The secret is a one-to-one ratio of Miracle Whip and Kraft Zesty Italian salad dressing. Whisk them together to get a pasta salad dressing that is millions of times better than the dogshit you buy from a deli.
Add whatever sort of veggies you want. We love cucumbers and bell peppers. Some cubed aged cheddar cheese is also a nice addition.
Bonus Rant: Spotify Sucks the Big One (Or are we just stupid…?)
When we cook food for, or write for Mediocre Chef we love listening to music. It’s great background noise to help us lock in and cook/write (shout out to the iPod and iPod nano. They got us through middle and high school fr fr).
Our music platform of choice is Spotify.
Mediocre Shill 🤑: Check out the Mediocre Chef Cooking & Vibing Spotify playlist. We hope you enjoy our extremely weird music sensibilities. (We don’t actually get any money from a Spotify Playlist, we just wanted to share something fun.)
Spotify has a feature called “Jams” whereby people can contribute to a playlist that plays in real time. You can add songs, change the order, and even skip things if the vibe isn’t right.
The amount of time we have spent trying to troubleshoot a Spotify Jam is ridiculous. We are, in particular, calling out the Spotify UI/UX designers.
Quit 👏 Your 👏 Jobs 👏
We have never seen a worse UI/UX experience. Oh, you want to add a song to a jam? Should I press the plus button? NO. WRONG. You’ve just added the song to your liked songs. Instead, navigate through a series of convoluted menus that you have to access only through the Spotify Jam section. Be careful not to accidentally click “End Jam” though.
Nope. Don’t click that.
Oh you want to start a jam on your PC? How do you add things? Gotta click the three dots and click add to the queue. Wait, why can’t you do that on mobile? Oh you can? Cool. Didn’t realize that, because why would I ever know that? Why are there both a “Next Up In Queue” and a “Next Up” section?
Why did the song randomly skip mid way through and then return several songs later?
Why did the jam desync? If both parties are listening to the jam, they should be listening to the same song, so why are they listening to different songs? Why does changing the jam song resync them?
See how they’re different songs? Yeah.
Fix 👏 Yo 👏 App 👏