Salad you will want to mainline, plus 5 tips to make every salad incredible

I'm a salad geek. I love love love salad, but I'm very fussy about it. Salad to me should be a feast, a beautiful, flavourful celebration of raw veggies and certainly not a chore. But I have discovered there are a number of secrets to a really, really good salad - i.e. salad you will crave, and love, and relish - not salad you will force down your neck because you're trying to be virtuous. Here are five life lessons I've learned, gleaned from years of trial and error when it comes to salad, from experimenting, from travel, and from recipe books, restaurants and endless blogs. 

5 tips to make every salad sexual:
1. Use fresh herbs. I was always of the mind that fresh herbs are either a nice addition to a meal like curry or pasta, or a garnish. But fresh herbs as one of the main ingredients of a salad is a secret I learned from the incredible Denis Cotter of Cafe Paradiso - and I haven't looked back. Denis Cotter is the Heston Blumenthal of vegetarian food. He is a vegetable hacker. As an aside, if youre ever in Cork, you absolutely must visit his restaurant. If youre a vegetarian, his books are bibles. I'll post my adaptation of one of his incredible salads another time, but I learned from him that fresh herbs can be the main basis of a salad (instead of relying on limp, anaemic lettuce leaves). Use huge quantities of fresh herbs like basil, fresh coriander, flat leaf parsley, mint or herb parsley to enliven any salad. Fresh herbs have potent health properties too, full of iron, antioxidants, blood cleansing, and a host of other benefits including boasting anti-inflammatory properties. The salad I'm making in today's blog is a perfect example of how to let fresh herbs be the star of your salad.
2. Make your own dressing. See this crap?

Please make a pledge to yourself never to ever use this dirge water ever again. Please. It is the salad killer. It will make your salad lifeless, wilty, chemically, and plain old vomitey. Ban them from your life if you have any respect for yourself. There is a very simple formula to any salad dressing and you can make your own in 1-3mins, for half the cost of these disgusting bottles of mucal gak. The formula is as follows:

Oil + Acidity + Optional other flavour + salt and pepper

So for example, olive oil + balsamic vinegar + dijon mustard + 1 clove of garlic + salt and pepper

or, rapeseed oil + apple cider vinegar + lemon juice + salt and pepper

or, one of my favourites: olive oil + lemon juice + honey + wholegrain mustard + lots of pepper

You can have lots of fun experimenting, and make wonderful flavour combinations which will make your salads sing. Jamie Oliver is fantastic for salad dressing recipes. You can get as creative as you like, adding chili, herbs, avocado (for creaminess), you name it. But please for the love of god and salads, make your own goddamn dressing.

3. Keep it simple. Use 3-4 brilliant, fresh, in-season ingredients and let them do the talking. Allow the flavours of each ingredient a chance to shine. I used to make these crazy concoctions with every vegetable I've ever heard of all piled in together. The result is a clusterfuck of flavour, where your beautiful, ripe tomatoes are drowned out by the myriad of other ingredients they are competing with.

4. Chop your veg properly. I have a few weird texture issues with food, one of which is I actually cannot even cope a little bit with huge lumps of vegetables. Chinese food is anathema to me, with their huge, slimey unchopped mushrooms staring up at me from the tray. But Ive found that salads are much easier to eat and the flavours are much easier to combine when you chop your ingredients finely. But perhaps that's just me...

5. Ditch the lettuce. Well, at least ditch this stuff: 

This is good for you, sure. But it is boring. If you want to have a leaf-base for your salad, I recommend trying some of the wonderful, tastier, often healthier alternative leaves out there. Some of my favourites are rocket, spinach, red chard, and watercress. Big, lettuce-heavy salads smeared in greasy shop-bought dressing is the reason why most people do not get very excited at the mention of salad. 

I'd like to share the recipe for one of my favourite salads in the world, tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a Lebanese dish which dates back to the middle ages and beyond. Its an ancient dish using qadb, or fresh herbs, as the main ingredient. You might be familiar with tabbouleh as this cous cous or bulghur wheat salad in non-Lebanese restaurants, or worse, in the "salad" section of spar:

This bears little resemblance to the traditional lebanese tabouleh, which uses very little bulghur (never cous cous) and MOUNTAINS of fresh herbs. It is utterly addictive.

Tabbouleh Ingredients 

• 4 bunches of flat leaf parsley chopped finely
• 1 bunch of fresh green mint chopped finely
• 4 inches cucumber chopped finely 
• 2 medium sized tomatoes, diced
• 1 small white onion chopped finely
• 1/4 cup of fine Burghul (I use Quinoa as an alternative) - do not use cous cous!!
• 1/3 cup of quality olive oil (I often use less if I'm watching my weight)
• Freshly squeezed lemon juice - 2-3 lemons
• 1/2 to 2/3 teaspoon of salt
• 1/3 teaspoon of Lebanese 7-Spices*

* Lebanese 7-Spices contain equal proportions of the following ground spices: Allspice, Black Pepper, Cinnamon, Ground Cloves, Ground Nutmeg, Fenugreek, Powdered Ginger (I generally use some or all of these bought seperately. Be sparing with nutmeg and cinnamon if youre doing this yourself and not via a lebenese 7 spice! Even just some all spice will do if you dont have these ingredients in your cupboard...)

First, cook your grain. I use quinoa which you mix 1 part quinoa to 5 parts water. I put it on at the beginning, on ususally by the time I have everything chopped its cooked. I pop it in the fridge to cool. Chop all the flat leaf parsley (I use a full large bag from tesco) and mint very finely. I use a loose chiffonade method which yields a lovely result (not as neat as this link, but generally in this ball park!). Place the herbs spread out on a plate on top of a sheet of kitchen roll to dry out. 

Chop the cucumber, and place on a sheet of kitchen roll, with another sheet on top to absorb the moisture. Chop the onion and do the same. Finally, finely dice the tomato and repear the kitchen paper step. At this stage you should have 4 plates of veg with kitchen roll.

At this point youre probably getting completely put off by all this bullshit drying out and kitchen paper nonsense. 

You dont have to do this, but it makes for a much nicer salad when all the ingredients are dry when mixed, and the dressing forms the only moisture. Now make the dressing - simply combine the oil, lemon juice, seasoning and spices and whisk with a fork.

Then pour all your ingredients into a bowl except the salad dressing and mix well.

Once mixed, Tabbouleh gets soggy rather quickly, so it’s best if you mix it immediately before serving. Moreover, make sure that when you add the chopped veggies to the mixing bowl, that they are dry of moisture and juice otherwise your salad turns soggy. Ideally you want the juice in the salad to be mostly from the lemon juice and olive oil.

Now serve! I had this with home made falafel, tahini dressing and mountains of tabbouleh. You can have this shit with anything though - its amazing as a side for pasta, with chips, pizza, lasagne, anything really. Bring it in for lunch the next day and sometimes its even better (despite being a little soggy). MUCH HEALTH. SO WOW.