Hobbies to pick up if you are bored 🥗

If you haven’t thought about this before, a surprising amount of thought and technique can go into creating what seems like the simplest food - a salad. Here are some of my thoughts on this grave matter, though many of them are explained much better by expert of seduction Internet Shaquille.

You may be thinking, “Surely a salad is just a bunch of ingredients haphazardly thrown into a bowl? Just raw vegetables (and hard boiled eggs if you’re kinda nasty with it)? I don’t even like healthy food.” And you would be dead wrong. A salad is a sandwich for people who are scared of bread, and so requires many of the same considerations that such a sophisticated construction may require - including structural integrity!

Let’s begin with that. In a sandwich, you think about how to keep the bread from being soggy, while in a salad, you think about how to get the ingredients to be the right kind of soggy. For example, consider kale: the hearty leaf of the bourgeois. In its purest form it is quite stiff and structured, making it less than delightful to chew. That’s why J Kenji Lopez Alt suggests massaging it with oil, transforming it to be tender and yielding to your mouth, like a United States senator meeting an industrialist. Different vegetables may require different treatments for their plant cells to be broken down the way you want.

Another aspect of this is wetness. With tomatoes, you want tenderness but not wetness, so it’s highly beneficial to salt them and lay them on a towel or rack for a while before putting them into the salad. Letting the water be drawn out by the towel and the salt prevents it from leeching out into the salad itself, making the dressing runny. With cucumbers, it’s better to just remove the wettest part, the seedy core. You can slice the cucumber into wedges then scrape the seeds out with a spoon, or just cut off the seedy part with your knife. Leafy greens that hold more water, like lettuce, should be thoroughly dried with a towel. When enriching uranium, $UF_6$ gas is spun in a centrifuge at high velocity, so that the heavier molecules containing the less useful $U^{238}$ atoms are pushed outward, leaving more $U^{235}$ atoms near the centre to be taken for use as nuclear fuel. Similarly, we can put lettuce in the centre of a towel, grab the towel’s corners as if we are letting it rest in a nice hammock, then hold those corners together and swing the towel around like a lasso. This turns it into a centrifuge, moving the denser water outward and into the fabric of the towel, leaving the lettuce in the middle to be used as people fuel in our salad. Of course, a salad spinner is also a useful tool.

Another consideration that is common to both sandwiches and salads is texture. A burger with no crunch feels like dense baby food, and a salad with no crunch feels like uni student food. As famous Israeli-American civilian Vince Offer once said, “you’re gonna love … nuts (and seeds)” Walnuts, cashews, and pumpkin seeds are great additions to any salad. Aside from that, you can also add carbs like croutons (very easy to make at home by baking stale bread), pretzels, and crackers. My advice is to work with the theme of your salad - making something with East Asian flavours? Try adding peanuts or sesame seeds. South Asian flavours? Try almonds. Tex mex? Crushed tortilla chips are amazing.

Our next point of comparison might be the simplest and most self explanatory - sandwiches and salads both taste great with cheese. I’m not even gonna bother expanding on this. You don’t need me to.

A last sandwich/salad consideration is sadness. In high school, my best friend Jackson used to have a plain bagel with a slice of Canadian bacon in it every day. I think witnessing this is how I discovered empathy. Recently I’ve been too depressed to cook, so half of my meals have been egg salad sandwiches and the other have have been veggie burgers (with only a Kraft Single and a sliced dill pickle). All around the world, the sandwiches eaten most often are the saddest. Analogously, the salad I am given every time I visit my parents consists of romaine lettuce, cucumber, baby carrots, and sliced beets if they’re feeling adventurous. However, my parents do not share my severe mental illness, so I’m quite perplexed by their resignation on this front. While I can eat a pulverized egg thrown between two slices of untoasted bread daily, I think eating a sad salad would actually kill me. I need variety, and occasionally even extravagance.

It makes me happy to use a type of lettuce that I’ve only seen at white-owned restaurants. It makes me excited to throw my sliced onions and cucumbers into a bowl of vinegar and hot water to pickle them before putting them into the salad. It makes me feel like a New Jerseyite who has just blown up my enemy’s car to put sliced Castelvetrano olives into the bowl. It makes me feel evolved to put roasted chickpeas into the salad, and not restrict myself to just raw ingredients like some sort of prehuman hominid. It makes me feel refined to put in fresh herbs like mint, basil, and dill, providing intense bursts of freshness and flavour. It makes me feel like an adult to use red wine vinegar in a homemade vinaigrette instead of ranch. Though it does make me feel like a midwesterner to use ranch and that’s pretty cool too, especially if it’s homemade.

I have more thoughts on salads - other ingredients that work well in them, how to store them well, their place in western cuisine and broader culture, their pretense of being simulacra of food to hide the fact that food itself is a simulation of itself (RIP Baudrillard, you would have loved avocado toast), and which way you should slice chicken before you throw it in. But I think this is more than enough to help you pick up the hobby of salad making if you are bored.