Final Thoughts on Salad!

We made it people! One chapter down! And only all of the other ones to go (10 more, oh boy)! To commemorate this milestone, this post gets all my final thoughts on all the salads out before wholeheartedly jumping into the pasta chapter.

Let's go!

Starting off with some gentle criticism! While fun to make and genuinely all tasty to eat, finding the ingredients for a lot of the salads (like the nonexistent sprouting cress from the very first recipe) and julienning some ingredients (like for the damn Carrot Slaw) made the whole process take more effort than they are really worth and much less enjoyable. There are recipes, like the carrot slaw that I will likely never return to simply because their level of annoyance to make was higher than their level of tastiness. The level of difficulty for finding unique ingredients (such as multi-colour heirloom tomatoes) was obviously an attempt at making the recipe more exciting but honestly, these “more interesting ingredients” didn’t make much of a difference in how much I actually like eating the salads. For example, I loved the Sweet Potato salad even though I had to substitute plain ol’ Roma tomatoes. 

One fine critique on this “salad” chapter is that they (they = Jamie Oliver’s team) seemed to use the terms “appetizer” and “salad” interchangeably when they chose recipes for this chapter. I say this because a lot of the dishes genuinely do not quite come off as salads, i.e. the Duck and Orange “salad” that consisted of duck slices on toasted bread and a garnish of orange and watercress and the Wild Cherry rice plate that featured a big of Swiss chard and a lot of rice and cheese. I’m definitely not saying there’s anything wrong with these recipes, because I loved the chard and rice situation, but I do think they maybe should have named the chapter as “Salads and Appies” or something. 

On to some positives so I don’t sound too much like a negative Nancy (it doesn’t help when my name is actually Nancy...)! My boyfriend was routinely impressed by the fact that the salads usually consisted of ingredients we never really cooked with ourselves but tasted great together and balanced a dish. On the flip side, we were also happily impressed to play with some ingredients we do always use in a new way.

Looking to the future, I’m super excited to get started with the pasta! I already flipped through a few of the recipes (for a third time) and the ingredients already look easier to obtain so that’s a big relief for me right off the bat. We also eat pasta pretty regularly at home for dinners so this chapter will be nice and familiar for us and hopefully will give us some recipes we can easily replicate even when we’re not cooking directly from the chapter anymore.

As they say, onwards and upwards my friends! And by upwards, I'm referring to the upward motion of a forkful of pasta going from the plate into my mouth.