thefourthvine | [Poll] SALAD (and Fandom)!

[Poll] SALAD (and Fandom)!

There has been some salad-related discussion in our household of late. (Actually, this discussion has been going on for at least ten years. Salad is an important topic in our family.) I cannot tell you what, exactly, we've been saying, or at least I can't without biasing the poll (and god knows I would never want to bias the ironclad validity and reliability of an internet poll!), but your thoughts are VERY IMPORTANT.

Also, because this is still a fannish journal, and also because I did not want to do two polls, I'm asking about the fandom that is most exciting for you right now. So even if you have no thoughts on salad - although I'm really not sure that is even POSSIBLE - please scroll down for the last question.

In this poll, for the record, I am talking about a green salad. Potato salad and fruit salad and caprese salad and - pasta-y things, whatever, those are fine, but not what we're discussing here. Those are SALADS FOR A LATER POLL. (And there will probably be one. The salad debate is reaching critical mass around here.)

Poll #10114 Salad and Fandoms

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 666

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What is the best part of a green salad? (Assume all items are high quality.)

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Lettuce!
126 (19.2%)

Tomatoes!
136 (20.8%)

Other assorted vegetables!
131 (20.0%)

Meat!
21 (3.2%)

Fruit!
43 (6.6%)

Other, um, salad components!
25 (3.8%)

Croutons!
51 (7.8%)

Other toppings, like nuts or weird crunchy things!
63 (9.6%)

Dressing!
59 (9.0%)

What parts of a salad do you like and look forward to? (As opposed to tolerating or exiling them.)

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Lettuce!
388 (58.7%)

Tomatoes!
382 (57.8%)

Other assorted vegetables!
478 (72.3%)

Meat!
218 (33.0%)

Fruit!
273 (41.3%)

Other, um, salad components!
278 (42.1%)

Croutons!
298 (45.1%)

Other toppings, like nuts or weird crunchy things!
401 (60.7%)

Dressing!
406 (61.4%)

In your ideal green-type salad, what is the dressing level like?

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No dressing.
60 (9.1%)

A tiny hint of dressing.
159 (24.2%)

Visible dressing.
353 (53.6%)

Every piece of the salad is coated in dressing.
80 (12.2%)

The salad is basically afloat in a sea of dressing.
4 (0.6%)

Actually, I just drink the dressing straight and leave the salad.
2 (0.3%)

Someone tells you, "Tonight, we are having SALAD!" Your reaction?

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YAY!
288 (43.8%)

Um, good, because - vegetables. Are good. And stuff.
196 (29.8%)

...And?
148 (22.5%)

So I will be making myself something else.
20 (3.0%)

Smile, nod, and then, as soon as possible, flee, never looking back.
6 (0.9%)

In addition to your thoughts on salad, I would like to hear your thoughts on fandom! What fandom are you really super-excited about right now? TELL TELL, please!

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I'm not really a salad person; I prefer to eat a lot of one veggie at a time, rather than mixing them all together. Also I'm not a tomato fan, and people always put those in.

I can't imagine eating a salad as a meal by itself. I need a heck of a lot more protein than salads generally contain.

I have adverse reactions to some foods, so mixtures are always suspect unless I know exactly what's in them. If someone's serving a salad as part of a meal, I am likely to pass, rather than interrogating them about what the ingredients are. (If it's a member of my family, they know better than to offer me a salad, and are more likely to give me a giant bowl of green beans or broccoli that is All Mine* and make different greenery for everyone else.)

*Yes, on occasion there have been Gollum impressions and hissing of "preciousssss..."

Occasionally I'll just make a big salad and eat that for dinner. In my house, the "base" of the salad is lettuce and tomato. That is in the salad no matter what. Then we have the salad extras: shredded carrot, thinly sliced turnip, cabbage, black olives, celery... whatever is in our vegetable drawer, basically. If it's the main part of my meal, I'll add protein to it, either cheese or hard boiled egg (if it's been a terrible no good very bad day, I'll add both). Then the dressing, which is visible, but not enough to drown it. Ranch, typically. Unless we've splurged and gotten spinach rather than lettuce. In that case I'll go for the red vinegar and splurge on salad for as long as it lasts.

That's how I make salad too - I also usually buy a chunk of salami every fortnight for the purposes of adding to salad for those rare days that I don't want egg.

Cos lettuce is the king of lettuces. There is no other, though spinach will substitute, if it's nice spinach.

No dressing, except in that the bits and condiments of the salad stuff make the dressing - so the crumbly bits of cheese, and the runniness of the soft-boiled eggs, and the vinegar from the olives, or whatever. That stuff, that's the dressing.

Cos lettuce is delicious, but butter lettuce and romaine lettuce and spinach are also good. And parsley, in tabouli. Iceberg lettuce is a cruel and miserable joke on humanity.

I like a nice vinaigrette, though, with just enough balsamic vinegar to make you wince.

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st_aurafina - 2012-04-10 12:20 (UTC) - Expand

I was raised on Punishment Salad (the nasty, pallid salad you eat because your mum thinks you're incredibly fat while everyone else gets a tasty dinner) so it's taken me a very long time to get into the mindset that salad can be delicious, filling and a summer treat. So I don't think I'd ever have the idea of salad as a meal, but sometimes

st_aurafina does, and then we eat delicious salad!

Yay! So glad you came over to the dark side. We have great salad on the dark side.

We British people are generally RUBBISH at salad. Limp soggy lettuce, a couple of baby tomatoes and some cucumber is basically default-salad here, and it is pointless and depressing. But this post is making me excited about good salad! With spinach, and sweetcorn, and croutons, and cheese, and peas, and other things that are yummy! :D

I did not select lettuce for anything, because I'm not wild about lettuce. Spinach, on the other hand, or arugula or mixed wild greens..

Salad without lettuce is entirely possible and delicious *and* does not involve washing lettuce. I don't like washing lettuce.

Salad has cucumbers and tomatoes and onion in it.

Also possible are rocket/arugula, spinach, sweet peppers, avocado, mushrooms, grated carrot (only if dressed immediately, otherwise it goes bitter by oxygenating). And other vegetables. Radishes are nice. Olives. etc.

Parsely and dill. Fresh and chopped.

Also possible are
Nuts. some fruit. cheese. cooked meat. croutons.

Dressing depends on the salad. The basic salad wants a little bit of olive (or other) oil, and a little squeeze of lemon juice, and salt and pepper.

Waldorf salad wants mayonnaise. Coleslaw wants mayonnaise, but not as much has there usually is in shop ones.

My mother's lettuce salad wants cos lettuce, and a dressing which is creamy and has loads of garlic in.

And now completely unsurprisingly I want salad.

It is all about the avocado!

Agreed! They've just gone out of season here, and I am sad. (But they will come again!)

I prefer salads without any greens because I hate washing lettuce, as the above poster said, and because I feel like they never last. I don't like making salads myself because I don't like to bother chopping vegetables, so most "salads" we eat are more like veggie dip. :D

At least around here, you can usually buy pre-washed baby spinach or spring/mesclun mix. I hate washing lettuce too, so I nearly always buy that stuff, especially since I like it better anyway.

It does require a certain amount of trust that it's as well washed as the label claims, but I will take that risk to support my own laziness.

I have become as addicted as possible to the salad restaurants in town (Chopt and SweetGreen). They make much better salads than I can make at home. I usually get something like romaine lettuce (I suffer lettuce to exist, but it's not exciting enough to have a preferred type), onions, peppers, carrots, maybe a seasonal fruit if it's apples or peaches, and blue cheese, maybe an egg, (once or twice bacon, but I'm not big on cold meat), and a dressing. Under no circumstance are tomatoes allowed anywhere near my salad. Tomatoes are evil.

Really, for me a good salad is about the combination of stuff, not which ingredient is my favorite.

You probably haven't heard of Horrible Histories, so here is an old post with youtube links.

My Platonic Ideal salad would have cos (romaine) lettuce, at least two sorts of cucumber, at least three sorts of tomato, avocado, red pepper... and possibly some other sorts of vegetables as well, and probably some sort of protein like poached salmon, maybe, but it's all about lettuce, tomatoes and cuke. and a little bit of oil-and-vinegar.

I just got introduced to Horrible Histories last weekend and it is AMAZING.

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cadenzamuse - 2012-04-10 14:37 (UTC) - Expand

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shark_hat - 2012-04-12 08:28 (UTC) - Expand

My biggest issue with green salads is that I... sort of hate greens. Pretty much all of them. I will eat a green salad if I have to, preferably with a light vinaigrette, but I will always, always choose something else first. I am that person who always picks the soup. I like all the other vegetables in the salad (except raw carrots, oh god, I hate raw carrots), but the lettuce and the arugula and just, you know, the whole basis of the salad, ugh. Do not want. Especially the argula. That stuff is just disgustingly bitter.

This is a problem, because I also hate most meat. Restaurants can be a challenge for me.

I swear I'm not really a picky eater, I just hate greens. And all red meat, most white meat, and steaky fish. And raw carrots. And mayo. And anything carbonated. But everything else is okay! Um.

The cucumber is the best part of a green salad.
Also, I do not think of meat as a normal or key ingredient in a green salad, though if I am having just a salad as my main course, it does need protein of some sort (chicken or shrimp or egg or something).

YES. Although in a race between cucumber and avocado, I might have to give them a tie donthateme.

Hey! One and two had no ticky for all the things. Everything works together to create the perfect salad and for 2, I am the salad maker so there are only things on it I want. If I order, I say leave off 'blank'.

Sometimes I make a lettuce-less salad. But we prefer our salad "with a little meat on top". (Tuna mixed with freshly homemade pesto is a current favorite - *pokes basil to grow faster*)

I was extremely lucky to go to college in San Francisco, and subsequently have a cafeteria not only with real food, but decent if not delicious vegetarian options and a well-stocked self-serve salad bar even on the weekends. And I did eat a lot of salad - usually skipping the greens and going right for beans and beets as the base and building from there. But not always. Man, I miss that cafeteria.

Since I live alone, if someone tells me I'm having salad, it's usually the waiter at a restaurant, so there's some built-in enjoyment of the situation right there.

I amswered all questions with the dressing-friendly options, but now I realize that perhaps that implies commercial salad dressing, which I don't buy. Just olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and maple syrup.

(Depending on the kind of lettuce. I did not tick the box for iceberg, which is basically water.)

Iceberg should be banned! It is the worst lettuce, except for perhaps that frisée stuff that gets used as garnish sometimes. That's like a little pile of grass on the plate.

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innocentsmith - 2012-04-10 14:53 (UTC) - Expand

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st_aurafina - 2012-04-10 15:04 (UTC) - Expand

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giglet - 2012-04-10 16:31 (UTC) - Expand

I'm afraid I could not answer your salad questions because the best part I would pick was missing. Where were romaine, spinach, and other greens? All salad evaluation depends on their presence!

I have friends who, when confronted with salad, start singing "You can't make friends with salad!" It took me a long time to learn that it's actually "You can't win friends with salad," it's from the Simpsons, and that nobody was trying to befriend a bowl of greens.

Beans! Or baked marinated tofu. Yummy ingredients that can make a salad a meal.

Here's one of my recent favorites, a taco salad: romaine (or other lettuce or greens); veggies such as carrots, bell peppers, or any others that look tasty; avocado; roasted taco-flavor chickpeas, as in this recipe, or any other beans; salsa as the dressing; then crumble some tortilla chips on top for crunch.

The weird thing about my strongest current fannish obsessions is how little source there is for all of them (and, for XMFC and Avengers, I'm talking about the movies; I'm coming to these fandoms from the movies). I mean, I've been fannish about movies before (Trek reboot, Master & Commander, yadda), but not to the extent that I would have identified them as my primary fandoms. All of my primary fandoms have been TV shows that ran for several years, and I was usually in them while the show was ongoing (and, indeed, I'm also fangirling Five-O right now, and still have not given up on SPN). But the things I am actively seeking out at this point are all much thinner on the ground, sourcewise. It's odd, not having a TON of source to roll around in and discuss. *le sigh* Hopefully AOL will come back healthy and happy from rehab and Five-O will continue its climb out of the hole they dug themselves into in the first half of the second season, and there will continue to be hotness in Hawaii. :-)

... I recently discovered while trying to infuse olive oil for dressing that I can make crispy garlic bits (like the kind on the outside of an everything bagel) in the microwave. Now that is the majority of my salad enjoyment, though a second place goes to oven-roasted spring onions. My salads used to leave me with chlorophyll-fresh breath, but now I have to carry salad mints.

If you can even count it as a salad, though, the soul of a good salad to me is CHEESE and also FRUIT. I try to wait and put the cheese and fruit on lettuce, but a lot of the time I just eat the cheese and fruit.

I can make crispy garlic bits in the microwave.

Oooooo! How!?

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sapote - 2012-04-10 13:55 (UTC) - Expand

Salal: I am a recent convert to (fresh, local, more or less organic) arugula. When I can get it, I use it in place of up to 100% of lettuce.

I didn't answer the first because for me the best part about a salad is that it's a pleasant but not spectacular way of eating vegetables. (My fav veggie dish is stir fry of any sort because SALT.)

Also, er, did the cookie cutter ever arrive?

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