American / Salad

I've written a bit about about the awesome food I've had since I've been back in Boston. And I've enjoyed that (the writing and the eating). Unfortunately, I have not been entirely lucky.

My good luck ran out on Monday. I was temping at the non-profit, which is in... certainly not a bad neighbourhood, but not a great one, and not one with brilliant lunch options. In Boston, the pizza-and-sub shop has the ubiquity of the Thai restaurant in Sydney. This means that wherever you are, you're likely to have some reliably good munching options, but they're almost inevitably high-fat, high-carb, low-fresh-anything. After a few meals like this on my first days at the non-profit I was burnt out, and I decided to try a Greek salad from one of the local joints. I figured that, while Greek salads are hardly the healthiest option, it's not a bad choice from this kind of place: there's a whole subgenre of Greek pizza places in and around Boston, of which this was one. (You can identify Greek pizza most easily by the crust, which tends to be thicker all around and quite crunchy on the edges, but the cheese blend is also a giveaway.) In addition to the usual pizza and subs, they usually offer gyros, Greek salads, and the other odd Hellenic bit and piece, so I thought I might be safe.

Oh, how effing wrong I was.

To start with, there was approximately a metric tonne of feta crumbled over the top - and by over the top I mean to a depth of about an inch. I never thought there was such a thing as too much feta... well, they showed me. The feta was dyed a pale pink where it was touched by the black olives. I chose not to think about this too closely, and dug deeper.

The vegetable mix included the standard iceberg lettuce and tomatoes (more on them in a minute), but was spiked with the somewhat less orthodox green capsicum, carrot, and radish. I didn't mind them - in fact, the capsicum and carrot turned out to be my favourite bits - but they were unexpected.

The dressing was of the creamy Italian variety (casual cultural insensitivity? you be the judge), but had a surprising pink tinge to it that worried me more than a little. Maybe it had been dyed to match the olives, like cheap bridesmaids' shoes? Moreover, I got two vats of it; one would have comfortably drowned a dinner-sized salad, which this was not. Two was... well, I reckon it was about equivalent to half a standard bottle of dressing, no exaggeration. And the pita bread I'd been told came with it turned out to be a massive round white bread roll. Sure, fine, whatever. Nothing could harm me, I'd faced down the tomatoes.

You guys, the tomatoes.

First off, they were green. Not, like, red with green tinges, but pretty well fully green (while still having enough of an anaemic pink blush to indicate that the restaurant wasn't just having a Fannie Flagg moment). Weirdly, though, they weren't as hard as green tomatoes tend to be; in fact, they were weirdly and unpleasantly squishy. And as if that weren't off-putting enough, the tomatoes had a coconutty taste that was, while not entirely unpleasant, certainly inappropriate given the context.

Coconut-flavoured juvenile tomatoes. Oy vey.

Look, I know it's the middle of winter. I know it was a moderately dodgy neighbourhood sub shop in a moderately dodgy neighbourhood. I know I should adjust my expectations accordingly: I wouldn't expect a dream-come-true salad from the equivalent-level chicken shop in, say, Rockdale in July. And I did have an awesome salad at Alchemist with Liz the other night: the tomatoes were still a bit hard and clearly out of season (just use grape tomatoes people, damn!), but the greens were lovely, fresh and tasty, and there was just enough dressing to emphasise the flavours without covering them. So it can be done. I've eaten the proof, and it was delicious. It's just... it's a rotten, cold, rainy day on the back of a number of rotten, cold, rainy days, and all I wanted was some vegetables. I've never cried over a salad before.

On a lighter night, this was on the homepage of boston.com the other night. I invite you to look closely at the menu bar on the left, where they have posted what they apparently consider to be the two most important maps of my fair city.

XOXO

Link du jour: OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS. I promise I will tell you about this in every possible detail. It might almost make up for the salad.