Salads are universal. Asia, Europe, America... just about anywhere you go, salads are part of the menu. Perhaps because they're simple to prepare. Toss in some greens into a bowl, add your favorite fruits, and voila! Your homemade salad is ready to serve.
However, salad preparation isn't just about throwing in all sorts of vegetables and fruits into a dish. Ever noticed buffet diners dumping just about every ingredient at the salad bar unto their plate? It's not a very pretty picture. You wouldn't want to be serving a heap of whatnot to your guests, would you?
Fret not. Creating your own homemade salad recipe is actually effortless and fun. Here is a secret formula to salad-making dubbed as The Three T's. And what better way to talk about it than to prepare a straightforward salad recipe.
Garden Crisp Salad
Main ingredients:
1 cucumber (sliced thinly)
1 carrot (sliced into thin strips)
Optional ingredients:
1/4 lettuce
1/4 grapefruit (chopped)
1/2 turnip (sliced into thin strips)
1 hardboiled egg (sliced thinly)
Thai pat sauce or your choice of dressing
Recipe 1: Mix main ingredients into a bowl. Top with your favorite dressing.
Recipe 2: Mix all the ingredients, excluding lettuce and sauce/dressing. Set aside. Arrange leaves of lettuce on a salad dish. Place the mixed ingredients on top of the lettuce. Top with sauce or dressing.
The Three T's
Tint. Cuisine is a creative endeavor. Enticing your guests to try out your personal recipe highly depends on the aesthetic appeal of the final product. Salads don't really carry an aroma, so you will have to do with visuals to whet their appetite. Imagine yourself as a painter and your ingredients as your palette of colors or art materials.
Garden Crisp Salad Recipe 1 is a simple, yet ideal example, of using tint when selecting ingredients. In contrast, Garden Crisp Salad Recipe 2 is a feast of pastel colors. Nevertheless, the varying shades are well-balanced and pleasing to the eye.
Texture. Apart from color, texture adds to the palatable experience. It tells a lot about the freshness of ingredients-something you cannot disguise. Although texture appeals mostly to the sense of touch, it also makes your dish visually interesting.
Both recipes balance out the crisp and tenderness of each ingredient. Balancing isn't a must. In fact, you can serve a bowl of mangoes and peaches, which are tender, and it would still be great. Feel free to experiment until you find just the right touch for your homemade recipe.
Taste. So you've enticed your guests with their sense of sight. It's time to hit the spot right where it matters. Behind all the fancy aesthetics, food is really about flavor. No matter how attractive a dish is, you have to get the taste right. It is the make it or break it point.
Both recipes are pretty safe when it comes to taste. It gets tricky with the sauce and dressing. Some overwhelm their salads with thick, rich dressings. Others just want a hint of spice and tang.
For the sample recipes above, the Garden Crisp Salad is meant to be easy to the senses. Ideally, a small amount of sauce will do the trick.
With The Three T's formula, you can have fun exploring the many homemade salad recipes you can create. It will be a great way to surprise your family, neighbors, or coworkers on the next celebration!
The author was inspired to write this piece after trying out the original salad recipe served at Vikings By the Bay Mall of Asia. Visit their website at http://vikings.ph.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=J._Cris
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