Lifestyle: The salad days of summer

Jul 2 2009 By Chester Chronicle

Lifestyle: The salad days of summer

Learning how to make a terrific salad is a skill. Become a salad pro with our easy-to-follow tips and recipes

AS soon as summer looms, those party invitations start plopping through the door. Suddenly you're expected to look bronzed, healthy and slim while holding a glass of fizz and not dropping your canapes.

This is where the gift of salad comes in.

In order to stay trim, many partygoers will live off iceberg lettuce, tomato and a Sauvignon blanc from May until September. But if this combination leaves you feeling faint, remember there's more than one way to toss a salad.

Alice Storey, who compiled the book 200 Super Salads, says that even the smallest supermarket offers an extraordinary range of lettuces and salad mixes, from baby spinach and beetroot to radicchio and rocket.

"In specialist shops you might find dandelion leaves, chicory, tatsoi, tarvido, sorrel and even edible flowers like nasturtiums and marigolds," she says.

Salad enthusiasts are adept at turning these leaves into a base for a mountain of food.

The key is to choose your ingredients carefully and create the right balance of flavours and textures.

For example, a light balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing works perfectly with salty fish, preserved lemons and a sprinkling of parmesan.

Alice advises trying out difference combinations. She also emphasises the importance of using good-quality ingredients, as raw ingredients have nowhere to hide!

"Using the best quality vinegar and oil are extremely important when it comes to making a good salad into a great one," she explains.

"When you are simply drizzling olive oil over salads, particular ones that contain tomatoes, use the finest extra virgin oil that you can find."

A great salad should leave you feeling sated, energised but not bloated. Using proteins such as fish and meat can turn a side salad into a meal, and it's also worth thinking about low-cost, fibrous alternatives such as beans and pulses.

"Grains are a useful addition to a salad, transforming them into filling and satisfying meals," Alice says. "Among the interesting pulses and grains you can try are buckwheat, wild rice, kidney beans, cannellini beans, butter beans, chickpea peas, couscous and quinoa.

"Canned beans are particularly useful, needing neither the lengthy soaking nor cooking of the dried types."

Here are five basic salad recipes to get you started...