Maybe it is my pre-carnival mood. The diamond grid. It reminds me of Italian commedia dell’arte. Carnival Venice style. Puppets, masks, the mysterious eyes behind. Luring, seductive.
I love carnival. I remember returning from the parade with a bag full of caramels. Another time we went to see the “drunken harmonies” playing across the streets in Maastricht. Carnival to me is a very artistic happening: costumes, decoration, music, fun fair food. Shaking off any quiet and hardship of winter, going crazy. For a bit. After a couple of days you can rest again to ease gently into spring, shedding off your old skin during the fasting period. A period of reflection and peace, like a soothing blanket, allowing you to slowly wake up to a world of flourishing spring and buzzing summer.
I have been longing for a lot of peace lately. I struggled, processing too many impulses, light, sounds, ideas, emotions, memories, plans for the future. I needed them all gently. And then the world going crazy, even more so than before, the cruelties it brings. I believe many people are longing for peace like I do, personally and politically. I can only say that I hope that you are all well. I send out my wish that you will feel faith in yourself, that you are able to bear hatred, pain and insecurity, that you trust that you have love and joy and beauty inside yourself, even if you can only feel it in little moments.
Many of my such moments lately seem to have consisted of making myself a salad. It sounds so funny as I write it. What is a salad? But if you think about it, the sun is always shining in a bowl of salad. You cannot look at a salad and feel sad and weighed down. Or maybe you can, but then it just needs a little sprinkling of lavender or a bilberry, some lemon zest, or a dripping of olive oil and some salt, taking a little pinch from a small jar with your thumb and index finger, then carefully dividing it over the salad by rubbing your two fingers together while going round over the salad. Look at your salad carefully during the process, it is your masterpiece of the moment.
How to start? Always start at the base, something leafy, something grated, something finely sliced, anything will do. What are you in for? Lettuce? Spinach? Chards? Kale? Carrot? Fennel? Celeriac? Cauliflower? Combine as if you are Picasso himself, picking the colours for his palette to create the exact atmosphere that he wants.
Then onto something more fruity, filling your salad, colouring it in as it were: tomatoes, cucumbers, paprikas (yes, they are all plants’ fruits), or more sweet ness from apricots, plums, melon. For winter maybe an apple, an orange, pomegranate seeds, dried fruits like currants and prunes. You can add cubes of beetroot, celery, fennel. Even if all of those will work as a base too.
Tomatoes and grated carrot are brilliant together and very Argentinian as I understood once. I had no idea. Lettuce, then cauliflower in thin slices or crumbled florets, topped with pomegranate seeds, radiantly beautiful. Last summer I started adding frozen bilberries to any salad, as if it instantly turned it into happy memories of forest walks in the Vosges mountains and future sunny breakfasts with fresh bread, butter, and confiture de myrtilles. Luxurious, elegant.
Then seasoning, something to lift your salad, to pick you up when you eat it. Something savoury, some olives maybe, or nutty, toasted seeds, sunflower, sesame, poppy. Walnuts with apple, almonds with orange, orange with anything really. Orange with olives. Something tangy, finely slice onions, possibly marinated in vinegar to soften them slightly, a shalot, finely sliced cornichons (gherkins), or capers. Something flowery. Lavender to make the sun shine, orange zest for that je-ne-sais-quoi, violets, just because they are so goddamn pretty. The flowers of chives, for a gentle hint of onion and a generous lush of purple.
Finally a vinaigrette, you can put all your love into a vinaigrette, gently mix it in with your hands over some well-dried flavoursome lettuce and you don’t need anything else with it. Your salad can be just that, and the most delicious thing for you to feel understood in your longing for beauty. Never underestimate the power of simplicity.
However, I have been lazy with my vinaigrettes. I wanted to cut, slice, tear, exuberance, the rainbow in a bowl. I used very ten-second dressings mostly: some olive oil and vinegar. Lemon juice. Sesame oil, from the top of a tahini jar for extra nutty savouriness. Sometimes I had mustard moods. Being lazy again, for this, I often carefully pushed some of the salad in my bowl with a fork to the side, so that I had a corner on the bottom to blend the mustard with some vinegar and oil before mixing it in to the rest of the salad. Otherwise it is too thick to coat the ingredients evenly.
I’m sure it would have been more delicious if I had used a separate glass to mix instead. And you can easily store leftover dressing in a jam jar in the fridge, prepare ahead. I did not have the patience to do this as I had for the slicing and cutting and toasting. Maybe it will be my next fad. Who knows. Maybe it will be fresh herbs, another thing I did not really have good access too for now. Imagine what a little parsley, tarragon, mint, dill or thyme can do for your salad. Mostly though, I used dried herbs, cumin seeds, nigella seeds. And also the tops of fennel, the leaves of celery. Good enough for now.
My salads have been salads to soothe me, I mean, to make me feel light, take off the edge of my hunger, rather that fill me up and make me feel heavy. Somehow, I yearned so much to feel light. A salad often seems to calm my nerves, as if it nourishes my sparks, or the lack of it. As if it clears up clouds and reconnects currents blocked or slowed down.
I feel a salad like this is a very sensory food, spiritual rather than physical. Not filling you up, but just tickling all your senses, the million flavours and combinations of them, their fragrances, all the different textures together, the sounds as they snap, crisp, crumble and crush, smoothed by the dressing. And then all the colours and shapes for your eyes to see, the mosaics you create.
It brings me such pleasure and joy in moments when my body is in winter mode, as if sleeping, reflecting, preparing, until it will wake up again from a tender kiss of spring and gentle sun and rebirth.
Wishing you all happy carnival days, Catholic, Orthodox, anything, nothing: celebrate!
Sending you my warmest wishes. I hope to meet you all again very soon.
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