June 14th, 2019

Every week I make a giant green salad for myself.  Each day I have a big dish of it for lunch.  It's not a fancy salad, there is nothing interesting or creative in it.  It's mostly various sorts of lettuce, a cucumber and then either tomato or celery or maybe peppers sliced up in there.  Why?  Because that is the way that I like it.  Simple.  And no, I never get tired of it.  

If I want to change it up a bit, I might slice up a boiled egg on top. Or dice some really beautiful mozzarella cheese into it.  By the way, I generally do not use actual formal "salad dressings".  I like to drizzle a little Balsamic Reduction on top.  Maybe a little unconventional, but again, I like it and I am, after all, making this salad primarily for my own use.  Tim might enjoy a very small salad before a  meal now and again, but for me this IS the meal.  

All well and good, right?  I really never gave it a second's thought until I was watching some cooking show while I was ironing.  

Side note:  I love cooking competition shows.  It's exciting to me. It's interesting and fascinating and captivating.  I could not possibly care less about sports competition shows, but give me a good bake-off or an episode of Master Chef and I am glued to the screen. Such a weirdo.

Anyway, in the particular show I was watching, the contestants had to create an entire meal, appetizer course, salad course, entree and dessert.   I was so surprised at what they were calling a salad.  It wasn't at all what I refer to as a salad.  It was pretty, don't get me wrong.  Very fancyschmancy. But if it were served to me, I wouldn't immediately think:  salad.  It was stuff more like:

It made me wonder. Have I been wrong all along about what exactly constitutes a salad?  It's not unprecedented after all.  I have been wrong before.  I think I may have majored in it.  So of course, I looked it up.

​sal·ad
/ˈsaləd/
Learn to pronounce
noun

1. a cold dish of various mixtures of raw or cooked vegetables, usually seasoned with oil, vinegar, or other dressing and sometimes accompanied by meat, fish, or other ingredients.
   "a green salad"

Okay.  I guess technically all of the dishes above quality.  Raw or Cooked vegetables. Meat, fish or other ingredients.  Wow. That is pretty broad.  I mean we might be straying into entree territory here.  Where do you suppose they draw the line between a salad that has meat in it and an entree that has vegetables in it?

You will notice that it doesn't mention fruit though.  Did you see that?  Vegetables. Not Fruit.  So then, why is a bunch of cut up fruit in a dish a fruit salad?  Or the ever so nasty gelatin with fruit in it called a Jello Salad?  Or even weirder...smashed up egg with mayo is an Egg Salad!!!  Why oh why oh why?

There are a lot of food related things that make me wonder.  Like French Fries and French Toast.  Neither one is from France. So why French?  Well with French Fries, during WWI, American soldiers were introduced to this food in Belgium. The official language of Belgium is French.  The potatoes are fried after all.  Hence, French Fries.  But technically it's wrong.

The jury is still out about French Toast.  There are several interesting theories but nothing absolute.  Still, it's not French particularly.  And the recipe has been around since Ancient Roman times.

And then there are other things like, Boston Cream Pie.  It's lovely. It's delicious. It's delightful.  And it's also not a pie.  It's a cake.   Again, food historians aren't positive about the origin of this misnomer either, but they think perhaps it's because the cake was usually made in a pie tin because most people didn't own cake pans. Hmmmm.  It reminds me of an episode of the old Harry Anderson show, "Nightcourt" where Harry says to someone, "Just because your cat had kittens in the stove, it doesn't make  them biscuits!"

And please someone explain to me why some people say, "Pizza pie".  Pizza MEANS pie.  So effectively they are saying, "Pie pie".  Pizza is certainly worth saying it twice. A good pizza is a thing of beauty after all. But really...saying pizza pie is unnecessarily redundant. Please stop.

I could continue. Endlessly. I have limitless curiosity about the world and that will never change.  But that is no reason for me  to inflict it upon you.  I will stop here and wish you a wonderful weekend!

Happy Father's Day to all the dad's of EVERY sort out there (dads, fathers, papa's, step-father's, paters, grandfathers, daddies, pops etc.)  Make sure that you celebrate them all!  They deserve it!