The Salad Bowl

This is my salad bowl. It’s nothing particularly impressive–just plain, white and deep enough to hold a filling meal. I bought it at the 100-yen shop a few years ago. It’s only made of plastic, but that means it won’t break or get chipped if I accidentally drop it, which is likely to happen. No, my salad bowl isn’t all that much to look at, but it’s utilitarian. Maybe if I’m feeling fancy I might draw a smiley face on it in permanent marker. Or not. I’m a bit fond of its unobtrusiveness.

The rules of the salad bowl are simple. I make a salad as near to every day as I can. I put the salad in the bowl. I eat the salad. For the purposes of this blog, salad will refer to any collection of forkable food of which 90% or more is plant matter. Preferably green plant matter, but I don’t want to box myself in this early in the game. The important thing is that it’s fruits and veggies, and that it must fit within the bowl to qualify as edible.

Now, living in Japan I’m a little, how should I say, limited with what produce I can put into the bowl. Most fruits and veggies out here are seasonal if I don’t want to be selling internal organs to pay for it. The goal is to lose weight and save money, but I’d rather avoid hacking pieces of myself off to do it. That said, I’ll have to be a bit creative with what I put into the salad. If I happen to make a salad in which the only components are Japanese squash and steamed carrots, let’s just assume that Nicky couldn’t stomach the thought of eating one more mouthful of shredded cabbage.

Finally, I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a chef. I probably won’t be making anything that looks like this. I cook only rarely and when I do, it is with a complete disregard for the thousands of years of history humans have put into turning raw materials into palatable foods. Part of that is because I almost never have all the ingredients and/or tools to make something from a cookbook. The other part is that I don’t take directions very well. But hey, it’s a salad, right? How much do I really need to know?