To reclaim and redefine "salad" (emotionally, at least)

I have never really loved to cook. I love to eat good food, and as a result, I’ve cooked quite a bit. But at best, it’s still stressful. And that’s if you’re only cooking one thing. If you are trying to triangulate multiple courses to be ready and still hot all within a few minutes of each other? That is seven-dimensional chess. You have little real control over what’s going on, making hot food. You can have thousands of reps with your burners and your oven, but how the quantity and consistency of food react to “low-medium-high” or “400 degrees” is going to be a little different every time. You are on the fire’s time, watching and waiting for when the fire is ready for you to eat the food you believe, falsely, that you are making.

Borne of the fires of this literal hellscape, let’s consider the salad.

I know: There are few dishes that I consider more of a natural “predator” of me, as a human woman, than a salad. Salads stalk women from storefront windows and TV commercials like so many jungle cats, reminding you that even if you escape today, you can never truly be free of the specter of the perfect ideal of the nutritious food you should be eating, for health, for hotness, for immortality. “Woman laughing alone with salad,” the improbable contrivance of elements that haunts my generation to this day! It’s salad. It’s always been salad. Salad of just vegetables, no accoutrements, certainly no croutons, and if we’re being "serious" about all this, no dressing.

The mere mention of salad makes me feel deflated. The very word is pathetic; it’s appropriately, cornily on-the-nose close to just being the word “sad,” dangerously close to being “dull.” The “d,” the “l,” the “s,” all letter-sounds that are distinctly beta in their bearing.