Your Salad Repair Manual

If you're honest with yourself, you know you need some salad assistance. Here is the post you didn't know you needed to read until now. Your salad game may never be the same.

One key to eating healthier food is to make healthy options as appealing as possible. This shifts your focus away from what you shouldn’t be eating and instead allows you lean really hard into making the things you should eat downright delicious. Excitement for this new way of eating will grow. I call this “the crowding out principle,” and it works especially well with kids.

Instead of announcing to the family that there are going to be no more chips, and no more Oreos, and no more cotton candy-flavored sugar pop cereals, you can instead have so many healthy but enticing options available that no one misses the bad stuff.

Central to this principle is expanding your salad repertoire, and making salads as enticing as possible. One reason I love salads at dinner is I find that I like to sit down and eat for a long time. I particularly like to crunch something. When I don’t serve enough vegetables, I find that even though I may be full, I feel unsatisfied because I didn’t get enough time chewing. (Okay, that sounds really weird.)

But it’s true. There’s something satisfying about spending a lot of time eating. And when you eat a salad, it takes some time to get it all down unlike rice and pasta which can be slurped with very little chewing.

Note of caution: I occasionally meet with someone who has severe gut issues making the fiber in salads and other raw veggies disruptive. If you have gut issues, pay attention to how you feel after salad and veggies. Some people with SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) need to fix that before throwing themselves headlong into salad territory. But for everyone else, embracing the world of salads will propel your health forward.

I’m gonna wager a guess: your salad situation could use a bit of sprucing up. Am I right?

You’re all wondering, “How does she know me so well?”

It’s because I meet with people in person to do health coaching, and one problem that comes up frequently is the perennial problem of the salad.

“What salad do I make? I’m terrible at making salad. I hate making salad. Nobody eats the salads I make.”

If you’ve ever uttered one of these salad laments, this post is for you.

Many of us have hidden in a closet 45 minutes before we were scheduled to be at a friend’s house where we offered to bring a salad and done this:

But never fear, FastWell FeastWell will forever change your salad game.

From now on, when someone says, “Can you bring a salad?” you gonna be like:

The other reason I know you so well is that I’ve survived many a salad woe in my lifetime, and I’ve lived to tell the story. The time has come for me to reveal my hard-won secrets.

I spent most of my life making the same four salads over and over. Of course, a four-salad repertoire is not as regrettable as it could be. After all, there are some people who have only ever made one salad in their life which consisted of iceberg lettuce, a semi-ripe roughly chopped tomato, Great Value brand I-Can’t-Believe-They-Try-To-Call-It-Ranch-Dressing, and five-week-old pre-shredded cheddar salvaged from the nether parts of the cheese drawer.

(If you’ve ever made said salad, no judgment. But I suggest you keep reading.)

So my salad situation was never that dire. But it was barely hanging on to decency. Recently, however, I’ve seen the light, had a coming-to-salad moment, reformed my four-salad-only ways, and I’m here to guide you on to greater salad enlightenment. You may never be the same.

Salad Repair #1: Never Use Iceberg Lettuce for Salad

Iceberg lettuce exists on this planet for the sole purpose of adding crunch to a sandwich or burger or as a replacement for a bun in a lettuce wrap burger, (a weekly or bi-weekly meal at our house—I can’t remember the last time we had buns). But it is most definitely never-not-ever fit for a salad.

See, you’ve learned something already. That one little bit of advice will put you head and shoulders above all the other salad non-aficionados.

Congratulations, your salad has just improved by 50%. But you still have a ways to go.

Some readers may object that a little iceberg lettuce adds extra crunch to a salad. If you feel that way, you can start your own Substack.

I’m totally kidding right now.

Well, maybe using the word “totally” was taking it a bit far. I’m kidding about my tone; I’m not kidding about my message.

I’m declaring this stack an iceberg-in-salad-free safe zone. I personally don’t feel safe in a digital space where iceberg lettuce is an accepted base for a salad.

Now that I’ve offended at least half my readers, it’s time to move on to the other half.

Salad Repair #2: Store-Bought Dressing Is Out

I think I just lost a lot of people. But please, before you go, pretty please, allow me to say a word in my defense.

First, making your own salad dressing is one of the most game-changing techniques in all of salad-making operandi. If you walk away from this post having learned nothing except to ditch the iceberg and whip up your own dressing, you are literally 80% there. I mean, take any lettuce on the planet besides iceberg, and add any homemade dressing, and you already have a tasty salad.

Second, dressings from scratch are so stinking quick and easy. Many of them call for only five ingredients and some of my favorites call for only two. Plus, the time required in often mere minutes. The ingredients required are items nearly everyone has at home. If you don’t have these ingredients on hand, you should buy them because they are staples that no kitchen should ever be without.

One key to changing your lifestyle to eating out less and cooking more at home is learning to keep your kitchen well-stocked with basics. I make a point to always replenish basics before they run out. For the things we use constantly, such as olive oil, I always have a spare bottle or two on hand.

Salad Repair #3: The dressing is never, I repeat, NEVER served on the side.

I just managed to say something that alienated 80% of my readers.

Half of you were nodding in hearty agreement about my merciless assault on iceberg lettuce. Another 25% of you have made your own dressing and agreed that it’s well worth the 6.5 minutes required. But this last point may be the most difficult to prove yet.

Because, here’s the rub: putting the dressing on the salad instead of serving the dressing on the side means that you will not be able to save any leftover salad.

All you uber frugal housewives out there be like:

I know what you’re thinking; I really do. Groceries are expensive. You do not want to spend precious money, not to mention the time spent chopping, only to have only half the salad get eaten and then have to toss the rest.

But hear me out. This is the revelation that all of you “I serve the salad dressing on the side so I can save what’s left” people are missing:

When you make a really stellar salad, with dressing pre-mixed in, you don’t have any leftover salad! (See what I just did there?)

The point is for your people to eat the salad, not for you to pack half of it up in the fridge so you can accost people with it a second time, this time with the semi-wilted version (since washing and chopping veggies causes them to rapidly decompose).

Plus, if there are chopped tomatoes in your salad, they will have disintegrated and left slime on the rest of the ingredients. Any acidic ingredients (as you’ll see when I get to recipes next week, I’m fond of adding acidic things to salads) will cause the lettuce to wilt and smell rancid.

I hate to break it to you, but since I’m on a streak of offending people here it goes: serving day-old salad that you preserved since it didn’t have the dressing on it is a recipe for turning people off to salad.

You might not like that hard truth. But no matter how many creative ways you contrive to retell the old, old story about people starving in Africa, it’s not going to make your semi-wilted day-old salad with dressing on the side taste one tiny bit more appealing (this truth is multiplied by infinity and beyond if the salad started with iceberg lettuce).

“But people like options for dressings,” one might object.

To which I reply:

What other meal do you serve at your house where you give people options for what sauces they can put on top?

Do you make eggs benedict and then say: now I whipped up a little hollandaise for those who are in a traditional mood. But for those who woke up fancying some tarragon notes, I made this lovely bearnaise. And lastly, for those who are inclined to a caramelized onion flavor with their eggs, may I suggest this bechamel. Said no housewife ever.

This is because any good chef determines the sauce that best accompanies the carefully chosen ingredients in the dish.

But more than that—and this point is key—lettuce tastes so much better when it is thoroughly coated in the precious dressing before it ever comes to the table. When one dumps dressing on a pile of leaves, most of it slides off onto the plate. No. Just no.

Now keep in mind that I’m teaching you how to make a really good salad. I’m not scolding you for arriving home from your kid’s soccer game at 7:19, everyone starved, and pulling out a slightly off-smelling salad kit (I never smelled a good one) and then tossing it with whatever 6-month-old bottle of dressing is easiest to grab from your fridge door. No judgment. It happens to the best of us.

I’m only saying that that’s not a salad, it’s a culinary tragedy. But tragedies happen. We move on as best we can. We pick up the pieces of our broken lives and try better next time. Such an attempt to push veggies on our family may or may not be better than no veggies depending on whether or not the dressing contains seed oils forged in Mordor.

Now, for anyone who’s still with me, “We few, we happy few” (to quote Shakespeare), I have two more points for you.

Salad Repair #4: Finely Chop All of the Ingredients, Especially the Lettuce

This is another reason why the pre-packaged kits are often such a sad excuse for a salad: the lettuce is often in gigantic pieces.

When cooking, everything is in the presentation. There is a huge appeal to eating something that easily fits on your fork and can be neatly placed into your mouth as opposed to wrangling with a giant swath of lettuce that leaves a ranch smear on the side of your cheek as you try to awkwardly maneuver it into your pie hole.

Finely chopped ingredients also make it more likely that you will fit a pleasant variety of tidbits and flavors into each bite. Otherwise, after all the unruly strips of lettuce have been cleared, you are left with a bed of dried cranberries and nuts that you have to pierce one by one with your fork, some of which go flying forthwith as you wonder to yourself: is salad even worth it? I would spare you such trials.

Salad Repair #5: Thoroughly Coat Lettuce Before Adding Toppings

This is a piggyback on #3 but it is important enough that it needs its own line item. You’ve done all this hard work: procured non-iceberg lettuce, you’ve chopped it finely, you’ve whipped up a homemade dressing, so now let’s make sure that the assembly and presentation come together to make a true masterpiece.

Toppings are heavy so if you mix the salad too much after they’ve been added, they fall to the bottom. Therefore, I like to follow this technique. Sprinkle a little dressing on the lettuce. Add fresh ground salt and pepper. Toss for 10 seconds or so. Taste. Sprinkle a little more dressing, add more salt & pepper, toss again, taste again. Continue until your lettuce is perfectly coated but not dripping.

The key is to keep tasting this delicate and delicious creation of yours until it’s just right. Pay attention to the delightful combo of the sweetness of the fresh lettuce and the tang of dressing.

When the lettuce is perfectly coated, then add the toppings and only slightly toss to blend them onto the top layer of lettuce. The toppings will continue to fall as people serve themselves. (Note: this same principle applies when making a pasta dish such as my signature pesto. The pesto sauce and freshly grated parmesan should be thoroughly mixed onto the pasta before adding the toppings, the quartered cherry tomatoes and thinly sliced steak or chicken. I’ll share this dish in a later post.)

Salad Repair #6: Buy Whole Heads of Lettuce

This will ensure that your salad is made with the very freshest lettuce. Chopping the lettuce injures the leaf causing it to immediately begin decomposing. However, there is nothing wrong with chopping it early in the day or even the day before, something I often do when I have company coming. But the pre-chopped lettuce from the store was often chopped over a week ago.

If you’re new to working with whole heads of lettuce, I need to give you a tip about washing lettuce. It simply will not work for you to take the head and just run the outer leaves under some water. Instead, you need to separate each individual leaf and thoroughly wash the vein down the middle, paying special attention to the base.

Dirt is often lodged in that inner white rib.

I find green leaf lettuce and red leaf lettuce to be the dirtiest. You often need to take your fingers and wipe the dirt from the base of each leaf while running it under cold water. Dirt can also be lodged in the crinkles of the lettuce leaf.

If this is just a quick weeknight salad and not a special occasion, I simply give each leaf a good shake inside my sink directly after washing it to remove excess water. But if I’m making a salad for company, I give the lettuce a good spin in the salad spinner after chopping it to make sure it’s thoroughly dry. The dryer the lettuce, the more the dressing will adhere.

One last point to keep in mind: these steps do not need to take all day. Yes, they will take slightly longer than ripping open a salad kit. But not much longer. And the taste difference is immense. I can easily whip up one of my simpler salads in under 10 minutes including washing, drying, and chopping the lettuce and making the dressing. Some of my more complicated salads take 20 minutes or even more but this is unusual.

For company, I do all the salad prep work earlier in the day and then toss the salad together at the last minute. (It’s like making your own salad kit—but it smells good.)

Next week, I am going to share all of my favorite salad recipes and then give you my blueprint for my Universal Salad Recipe which is a a set of principles I came up with that teach you how to mix and match a variety of ingredients and dressings for an infinite amount of salad diversity.

These are not going to be just your basic salads that anyone can google: a greek salad, a cobb salad, etc. No, these are hard-won culinary masterpieces complete with very bossy directions about how exactly they must be assembled.

But before we go, I need to issue a warning.

A Cautionary Tale: Beware of The Food Expectations You Create

Perhaps I should have told this tale first. But what I have written, I have written (to quote Pontius Pilate).

Even though my crazy raw milk, beef-organs-in-everything, homemade-bone-broth-round-the-clock, cod-liver-oil-for-all days are somewhat recent, I’ve always liked cooking and making somewhat healthy meals for the fam.

(I say “somewhat” because although seed oils have been banned from the house for decades—it was a sunny day in April circa 2003 when hubby innocently returned from the store with a giant tub of death, I mean Crisco, only to find out it was not allowed to cross the threshold; it was an honest mistake, we all fail spectacularly at times—I still used plenty of pasta and rice, and non-organic, glyphosate-saturated bleached white flour because I was ignorant.)

But the point that I’m trying to make, if only I would stop interrupting myself, is that although the meals were not super, duper, uber healthy, I did put quite a bit of effort into them. And this caused my children to become somewhat dependent (dare I say entitled?) to the taste of quality, homemade food.

And this is the reward I got for my labors. When other kids thought that eating at McDonald’s was a special treat, my kids soundly turned their noses up at it and all fast food. In fact, anytime we were on a road trip through the outermost reaches of the earth, aka western Kansas, and the only food at the exit was McDonald’s, and the nearest alternative came along when we hit the Colorado Rockies, the little rebels in the minivan solemnly declared that they’d rather starve than partake of poison forged from the bastion of all that’s repulsive in American fastfood. (Not in those exact words but you get the drift.)

What had I created?

When other kids had birthdays, they gleefully requested hot dogs for their special birthday meal—mighty easy on the mom. For my kids’ birthdays, they requested either boeuf bourguignon or my signature homemade pesto pasta with pesto sauce made from scratch with fresh basil leaves (I have never bought jar pesto), heavily topped with freshly grated parmigiano reggiano, quartered cherry tomatoes, and specialty marinated and grilled steak or chicken. Then, in the latter years of this tale, the expectations were upped to homemade pasta. (But at least by the time the meal had elevated to that level, the kids were old enough to be in charge of making the homemade noodles—something they still enjoy doing.)

I DID this to myself. I have no one to blame but the person in the mirror.

To this day, not a single one of my progeny will eat a hot dog or partake of McDonald’s. It’s a hardknock life.

The moral of this sad tale of trial and woe is that once you adopt my salad-making principles, you may never again be able to return to your old ways.

Attempting to bring anything less to the table may be met with dejected looks accompanied by:

“But where, pray tell, are the herbed goat cheese crumbles, the candied hazelnuts, the fresh local pear slices and the bed of heirloom baby greens drizzled with a balsamic reduction and single-sourced EVOO?”

Consider yourself warned.

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. The reader bears responsible for any advice taken. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through Jason Fung’s site TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, podcasts, or supplements with the exception of a book I contributed to called Yankee Doodle Soup, but I only receive compensation if someone writes “Taylor” in the box labeled “contributor’s code” during checkout.]