I should patent this salad. Takes about 10 minutes to make if you have lettuce and tofu prepped (that takes about 30 minutes weekly…).
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Lettuce, carrots, tomato, cucumber, pickled kalamata olives (store bought), pickled jalapenos (fresh pickled at home), baked diced seasoned tofu, avocado. Dressing is just lemon juice, salt and pepper, I don't like fancy dressings.
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The key is that I buy 3 heads of fresh lettuce every couple of weeks at the farmer's market, and immediately wash, chop, and spin-dry them, and bag in a large ziplock with some paper towels. That's what makes the salad -- really good and fresh/crisp lettuce as the base.
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For the protein, egg or feta or blue cheese work as well as tofu taste wise.
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I'd say this is equivalent or better than a Sweetgreens type lunch salad at 20% of the cost. I'd guess this costs me about $2 and it costs about $10 at a salad chain place.
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Wife does the jalapeno pickling and the tofu seasoning. The tofu takes some iterations to get right, but basically squeeze out water under a heavy weight, dice, spritz with oil, season with umami seasoning, nutritional yeast or just salt and pepper, bake at 450 for ~25min.
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The carrots can be chopped ahead of time, but the cucumber and tomato are best chopped fresh.
Replying to
It's tempting to do lots of batch prep, and even make 80% done salads in individual portions and only add the last 20%, but I've found that kinda screws up the freshness a bit. Take the 10 minutes... 30-70 prep/real-time is significantly better than 80-20.
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At the very least, never do tomatoes ahead of time. Only fresh chopped room-temperature tomatoes. Refrigerating tomatoes, or worse, refrigerating chopped ones, is the cardinal sin of veg food. And use tomatoes on the tart side, not sweet. I dislike current rise of sweet tomatoes.
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I use half an avocado for this salad, which means half the time I use a refrigerated half, which isn't ideal, but fine. If you don't know how to do avocado logistics, here's the trick.
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Replying to @Prigoose
My trick is to push gently on stalk. If it easily pops into flesh, it’s ripe. So I buy unripe, do stalk-push test daily once they turn dark, move into fridge when test passes to stage for eating.
So hack is: buy only unripe with a stalk, and maintain ripening queue of ~3-4
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I'm trying to make at least 50% of my lunches this salad and variants, kinda hard to keep up, but I'm kinda almost there.
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The fall-off-the-wagon part for me is the lettuce prep. We go farmer's market on Sunday, and if I don't do the prep right away, the lettuce sits there, dirty and wilting, and the effort to get to a lunch salad is too high. And pre-washed/chopped grocery store lettuce sucks.
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Hmm Mansion Salad is a good name for this. Oh, and I sometimes add pickled beets, but it's too much work and too stainy to be part of the canonical recipes. But a great substitute or addition to the carrot note is radishes.
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Replying to @vgr
Mansion salad
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The big secret of this salad is that all the ingredients except the lettuce are always in the kitchen for other uses. The prepped tofu goes into other dishes we make. The pickled jalapenos go on burgers.
Salad routines tend to break if they have too many unique inputs.
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This is why, though I like radishes in this, I rarely do them because it's an effort to maintain a radish supply chain. It goes in nothing else I eat routinely. There's no efficiency of scope.
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Update: I’ve increased the batch prep levels so the on,y thing I don’t do ahead of time is tomatoes/avocados. I even put in a lemon slice ready to squeeze in the prepped kit.
Dump kit into bowl, add tomatoes, squeeze the lemon, salt and pepper, mix, done. 2 minute finish-prep.
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Edit to above: I’ve taken to pre-chopping and adding cucumber to the kits for up to 3 days. Not ideal but good tradeoff. I actually do tranched prep: 3 full kits made on Sunday, rest of salad and chopped things separated, cucumber peeled but only partly chopped.
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So Thursday is second tranche prep where I make 2-3 more kits. But this takes much less time than Sunday main prep.
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