Killer Salad Recipes

Salads are about texture, colour and taste. Using the right set of ingredients, a chef can play with all those factors and come up with something that tastes, feels and looks great. Add to that a bit of dexterity, patience and a good knife and you’re ready for a genuine Tartan Salad

Take for example this nice MacArthur-Fox design:

Of course it would be hard to emulate the exact colours, pattern and stitching, but the following recipe will show that it’s possible to at least use any tartan design as a base for a killer salad.

To start off, we need some long strips of green, black and orange-y red. Keep in mind that this is an upside-down salad. We’re aiming for an effect here, then choose the rest of the ingredients to go with that. I’m using spring onions (cut lengthwise), carrot, and nori. Use a peeler to get thin slices from the carrot, and cut lengthwise if the strips are too broad. If you’re a sushi fan, you’re bound to have nori sheets in your fridge. Anyway it’s not very expensive and it’s quite versatile, so get some.

Ok let’s start cutting some strips of veg. Make sure that the strips you’ve cut are long enough: 5 inches is often sufficient. If you don’t have enough length, then just make the strips a bit narrower. Start weaving from the centre outwards, carefully lifting the ends of the veggies as you go along. If the nori is a bit brittle, then moisten it slightly. Don’t overdo it though, because it easily falls apart when wet.

Keep on weaving until you come up with a compact sheet of interwoven veggie strips as shown in the next picture. Best not to cut the edges unless you’re doing this on each individual plate. Instead – and this is especially handy if you need to transfer the tartans to a new dish or bowl – try and fold some of the nori strips back and make them stick with a drop of water, so they hold the whole thing together.

Now it’s time to add the rest of the ingredients, in order to make this into a proper salad. In this case, we were using spring onions, carrot and nori. The latter has a bit of a fishy taste, so it makes perfect sense to turn this into a seafood salad. For extra greens, I like the looks and peppery taste of rocket. The same taste is carried well by – please believe me – tiny crowns of cauliflower. Finally, open a can of decent salmon or (in this case) crab and flake a good handful on top. Add some seasoning to taste, like for example a pinch of sea salt, some powdered lemon grass, and some paprika or cayenne. Present in a way that shows the tartan… best on individual plates.

This salad had the tartan weave as a base, with the rest of the ingredients on top. However, if your “weave” is quite sturdy and flexible, you can also use it as a little blanket to hide the rest of the salad underneath, or put it upright against the side of a high cup or bowl. Just be creative. And of course: if your family has its own tartan design, then do your best to turn that one into a salad. If not, then just pick a design that suits you or that matches the stuff you have in your fridge…
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