“I live for a good house salad,” writes Pittsburgh-based Jessica Merchant in her new cookbook Easy Everyday, which I’ve been loving this month. “For some reason, a few years ago I became obsessed with the idea of having a signature house salad. An incredible, flavorful green salad…that tastes wonderful with almost every recipe.”
Isn’t that a fun idea? Her own house salad, she explains, has greens, carrots, tomatoes, onions and croutons, plus two standouts: asiago cheese and sunflower seeds.
As I was reading Jessica’s cookbook, I realized that my friend Liz Libré has a house salad. For more than a decade, she’s been making arugula with a lemony vinaigrette. (We even talked about it in her 2016 house tour!) “Five-year-old Griffin is the biggest salad eater in our house because of the dressing,” she told me back then. “He always has seconds.” Now age 14, he still loves it. (The dressing recipe: “I never measure, but it’s basically a good amount of olive oil and champagne vinegar, juice of half a lemon, one or two minced garlic cloves, a little Dijon mustard, a little mayo, and salt and pepper.”)
Also, I realized with a heart pang, my dad has one (pictured above). “Mine’s very basic,” he told me on the phone this morning, laughing so much that I was asking for his recipe. “I like the differently colored variegated tomatoes, I always have mushrooms and usually a mix of bell peppers, and I’ll do avocado, if avocados are good.” Sometimes he makes the dressing himself (“mainly olive oil, dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar, just slush it and that’s my dressing, we used to make it in France at lunchtime, it can be really tangy if you put lots of mustard”); other times, he goes with Newman’s Own or Garlic Expressions (“I bounce around”). He’s made the salad a gazillion times for us, and he estimates that he’s eaten it “probably every other day, for 20 years. Boring, huh?” Then he laughs again.
Would (or do) you have a house salad? I’m into the idea.
P.S. A trick for better salads, five salads without lettuce, and the magic of candles.
