Salads

A salad used to mean a pitiful offering consisting of limp lettuce leaves, chunks of cucumber, skin and seeds included, and eggs so over-hardboiled that there was a grey aura around the yolk. Mercifully, these are changed days, and salads come in such wide-ranging variations that they are both exciting to eat, nutritious and convenient. They can form a first course, as in the recipes for Asparagus Salad with Saffron and Lemon or Lime Aïoli, or the Avocado Salad with Tomato Cream. They can be a main course, like the succulent Smoked Chicken and Mango Salad with Curried Mayonnaise, or the Ham and Parsley Jellied Salad. They can be perfect food for those who don’t include meat in their diet, for example, the Three Bean, Chive and Tomato Salad with Egg Mayonnaise, or the Roast Vegetable Salad. They can also be an excellent substitute for a hot vegetable, throughout the year; a perfect example of this is the Fennel Salad with Lemon Dressing, which is so good with all fish or chicken dishes. During the winter months we can add a baked jacket potato to a salad such as the Beetroot and Orange Salad, or the Tomato, Watercress and Avocado Salad with its Crispy Bacon Dressing, to make a most delicious main course which is, at the same time, an effortless and delicious way to eat raw vegetables and fruit combinations – which we are supposed to eat all year round but which can fail to entice in cold weather.