If there’s one thing a guy can’t stand, it’s a leafy salad made up of far too much lettuce and healthy greens.
You want your salad to be so robust and manly, you could eat it with a fork in one hand and a beer in the other. You want your salad to be football-worthy. You want to turn on your 57 inch plasma display television and sink into your leather Barcalounger with a salad that’ll go the distance. If you’ve been looking for a salad that is so meaty and juicy it would be worthy of being placed alongside one of Borgo’s famous steaks, look no further.
Ingredients
Preparation
First, let’s prepare the ingredients. Have a lot of little serving bowls handy. And keep a garbage can close by so you can get rid of a bunch of that stuff you’re going to discard. Keep it close and keep it open.
I’m a big believer in preparing and assembling all of your ingredients first, putting them in bowls, and then making the salad in a big flourish. Mise en place, as the French say, or possibly the Italians. I don’t know why exactly this is. Perhaps it is because of the mistaken belief that Julia Child would do this. More likely, it’s because this is the way I used to play war with my toy soldiers: I’d get them into their positions behind their strategic fortifications, which would take up 90% of the time, and then, WHAM BAM, the actual war would take only a fraction of the time. I make salads the same way. Preparation is key.
- Eggs Boil eggs for about twenty minutes so that they’re hard boiled. Shell them and set them aside.
- Cucumber Lop off the two ends with a sharp knife, and skin the cucumbers with a cucumber skinner. I don’t know what the exact cooking term is but you know what I mean. Then cut the cucumber in half. Then, for each half, quarter it the long way, and then cut pieces so that they’re about 1/3 inch thick. Put all your cuke pieces in a bowl
- Onion Chop that sucker so fine it makes you cry, then stick the pieces in another bowl.
- Celery Take the five or six sticks of celery and lop off the wide white ends into the garbage can. Wash the celery in cold water until you think it’s clean. Then chop the celery into small chunks - the leafy parts too! - and get them into a bowl too.
- Tomatoes The tomatoes should be bursting with red goodness. Wash them. You’re going to have to sharpen a knife so that you can slice through them with a minimum of squirting and splatter. Cut them into manageable pieces.
Get your salad dressing, Italian seasoning and bacon bits close by hand, and line them up like soldiers. Got the bowls ready to go, awaiting your order? Excellent. You may proceed when ready, General!
Battle Orders - How to Make the Beast
Pay attention. The order of ingredients is the secret to this salad. You’re going to make the salad in layers so that the ingredients can talk to each other. (I heard that phrase once, and I like it. It makes it sound like there’s a natural, harmonious ecology to the salad, which there is.)
- Lettuce Wash the whole head of lettuce under cold water.
- Core the lettuce head. Turn it upside down, and then take a sharp skinny knife, and cut the cone of that hard white middle stuff out. If there’s one thing guys can’t stand, it’s that white stuff. Throw the white stuff away. You want your head of lettuce to be as green as possible.
- Chop the lettuce in half. Put that other half away into a zip lock bag, put it into the refrigerator and use it in a few days when you’re making your next salad.
- Take the half-head of lettuce and Chop it with a sharp meat-cleaver type knife so that there are no big leafy pieces. Every piece should be fork-sized. Men hate those big newspaper-sized leaves of green.
- Italian seasoning Lightly garnish the lettuce with Italian seasoning
- Croutons Put two handsful of croutons on top of the lettuce
- Cukes Spread half the cuke pieces on top
- Bacon bits Spread bacon bits across the top to taste
- Tomatoes Spread half the tomato pieces on top
- Eggs Chop up the eggs and spread half on top
- Salad dressing Very lightly dribble a bit of salad dressing over everything you’ve got so far.
- Onions Spread half the onion pieces on top
- Celery Spread half the celery across the tops
How to Eat It
- Turn on the football game
- Get that damned cat out of your chair with a cattle prod. This is your time.
- Get the remote control and put it by the side of your chair.
- Get a few brewskis and your favorite bottle of salad dressing out of the fridge and line them up next to the remote control. Once you get in that chair, you will be a completely self contained entity who will not need to move until halftime, or possibly the entire game.
- You might wish to have a small French baguette for the carbo-boosting necessary to offset the healthiness of the salad.
- Bring over the salad. Don’t forget a fork and a napkin. (Napkin optional.)
- Sit yourself down.
- Smell that salad.
- Turn on the television.
- Apply salad dressing as necessary.
- Watch game
- Eat salad.
- Thank me later.
Jurph points out: "1) When boiling eggs, transfer the eggs from boiling water to ice water to facilitate peeling. 2) When coring lettuce, it is simplest to whack the lettuce, stem-first, against a counter, so the cross-section of the stem hits the table like a hammer. Now the substandard lettuce has been sheared by impact; grab the core, give a vigorous twist like killing a weasel, and the core will come loose with all of the sub-standard lettuce. The lettuce trick is from my (AHEM) salad days in foodservice, and is a great way to (a) prepare 50 heads of lettuce in five minutes, and (b) practice for playing Splinter Cell."
Lovely Chiisuta chimes in with: "DAMN RIGHT. This is like one of my salads. But without all the salmon and salmon skin I usually put in as well. YUMMERS! Also, Italian is for sissies. Real men - like me - eat ranch."
The equally lovely paraclete gives us this critique: Don't boil the egg for twenty minutes; it results in that nasty crappy black yolk thing that I hate. Ten minute's will be just fine, thank-you. Of course, you're not making the salad for me, and it's not as if I even *like* salad, so you can have crappy black egg yolks if that's what makes a salad a MAN'S salad.
The equally equally lovely mad girls love song asks if romaine lettuce would be an acceptable substitute. As equally equally lovely as she is, I had to be quite forceful about quashing this tendency to substitute ingredients. Fortunately, this did not extinguish her spirit, as her reply was strewn with invectives.
unperson ponders the particulars of egg boiling too: Nice node. Though in my experience, it takes no more than 8 minutes to hard boil a "large" egg, not twenty. Have you been preparing this thing at high altitude or something? Also, it would be more manly if fire was involved somehow.
borgo: what the hell is a salad? The only ingredients I recognized were the bacon bits.
borgo makes a mean salad entirely out of meat
Goodyear, JohnnyGoodyear: A cheeseburger is a man's salad and that's the end of it.
allseeingeye: dude, if it's green, it's gone bad.
A fussy but probably quite elegant noder named belgand writes: There is no such thing as a "cucumber peeler" there is, however, the common household "vegetable peeler" a device also commonly used to peel carrots, potatoes, and every sort of vegetable with a skin on it. Napkins are never optional.
Tomatoes and football, however, are always to be omitted. Frankly the most manly salad I've ever seen was a 10 oz. strip steak medium rare, sliced, and served atop a modest bit of lettuce in a bowl.
golFUR Personally, I know there is nothing more fulfilling than eating a meat dish, off of a meat dish, with meat utensils.
AllSeeingEye again: I contend that a real man would not mix foods. Steak is good enough ALONE