📿 How To Make A Salad Sublime

Look! Thoughts on a few (often hidden) ingredients

À la plage

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📍Before we get to today’s dispatch of The Laundry — a quick note to mark your calendars: as our offering to paid readers this month, Adreanna will be hosting an hour long meditation & writing gathering on Sunday, September 29th at 4pm EST. We’ll have a chat. We’ll share a prompt. We’ll practice. We’ll write. And then full circle back to a chat again. Make some tea, let’s be cozy.

Details + Zoom link are accessible to paid subscribers at the bottom of this post. Hope to see you there.

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Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry—

One of Lodro’s dearest friends has a family home on the west coast of France that overlooks the sea. In the summers that we’ve visited, the air is cool and briny. The days are slow and offline. The meals are simple and mostly composed of creamy cheeses, spongey bread with crusts that crack open, and whatever produce is fresh at the market. 

The last time we visited, this friend gave the gift of teaching me how to make salad the regional way. It’s the kind of teaching that I adore independent of whatever I’m learning. The instruction is simple and practical; directional without being dogmatic. What makes it special (in my mind) is that it centers purpose and care for its subject to such an extent that an everyday action is made more artful.

Take for example, a salad. You could chop, toss, and dress some vegetables, and make a very good salad. Though if the intention is to center the integrity, flavor, and beauty of the ingredients, this might inform how you build them together. 

This particular way of constructing a salad begins by making a simple dressing at the bottom of a large bowl (I like to whisk together olive oil, balsamic vinegar, flaky salt and nutritional yeast until it emulsifies into a tangy cream). 

After your salad toppings are chopped, you would then toss them into the bowl and coat them with the dressing. This gives the ingredients time to marinade at the bottom of the bowl and soak in the dressing flavor. 

You get to decide what goes into your salad— the purpose of the instruction isn’t to dictate the ingredients, but rather to show how to infuse them with flavor.

Now we pile chopped herbs on top. Whatever’s fresh. This could be basil, parsley, dill. This part of the instruction is so practical that it’s a stroke of salad genius. The herbs serve as a cushion layer between the dressing and the lettuce so that the delicate greens don’t get soggy. The beauty of a lettuce is that it’s crisp and fresh and this layer preserves their integrity. 

Lastly, pile your chopped lettuce greens onto the herbs. Only when you’re ready to serve do you mix the ingredients together by pulling the marinading vegetables up to the top. 

It’s just a salad— which is potentially a boring, obligatory part of a larger meal. Though given some thought and attention, the ordinary salad becomes a bit more beautiful by engaging with it intentionally. 

These are my favorite kinds of teachings: whether it be Dharma, meditation practice, or a crib sheet for constructing a salad. I appreciate someone pointing to an experience as common as the moon and saying “Now what happens if you tilt that angle just a little bit to the left? Do you see how shifting the angle you’re looking from changes the way that you view the whole context of the sky?”

I was recently flipping through meditation books on our shelf looking for inspiration for an upcoming class. I came across a page, doused in yellow highlighter. “Why not just use pencil?” I asked the former version of myself that painted this page in neon. Maybe I wanted the passage to pop so that future versions of myself would catch it. Maybe I wanted to save the words with a medium that matched the urgency of its message.

In any case, these words by Chögyam Trungpa struck the same chord as our friend’s lesson on making a salad. He writes: