Salad for Men
Home yesterday evening, bored of reading about subterranean London excursions and playing Snake 2, I decided to have some supper. It was hot and sticky despite soft rain finally clearing the atmosphere, and lukewarm food like Italian-style cous cous (with black olives, tomatoes, pesto, what have you et c.) goes down a treat in such conditions.
Reader, I made a salad:
a smallish aubergine, thinly sliced, brushed with olive oil and grilled to smoky brownness;
slivers of a cheeky boar sausage (purchased recently in Greenwich at the travelling Bruno’s French Market: there was perry available and indeed drunk on this occasion, for the information of all you Glasto boozehounds) fried off gently while the aubergine was cooking;
a few halved cherry tomatoes and a finely sliced spring onion, added to the sausage and joggled about a bit for a couple of minutes once it had released some fat;
a generous splash of lemon juice sloshed into the frying pan to form a dressing with the sausage juices;
all the above tumbled in a large bowl with a big old load of ripped up iceberg lettuce leaves and seasoned with some freshly milled black pepper.
The result was interestingly savoury, the sausage and aubergine slices in particular combining well, and the lettuce and tomatoes providing a salient reminder of health and efficiency. It was a proper no-effort manly salad, and yet I had no man to share it with, because he lives in Portsmouth. So I scoffed it all myself, oh yes.