Homemade salads have eluded me for years.  I’d buy a head of iceberg lettuce, some appropriate other pieces and attempt to create a salad.  I recognize that salad is simply a glorified way of getting dressing into one’s body but found the repulsive power of lettuce an impediment.  In a flash of midnight inspiration, I realized that the fact that the lettuce was iceberg lettuce was the problem.  Romaine and I appeared to have always gotten along, so I moved onto the next phase of Operation: Salad 2010 Background: I’ve found the best New Year Resolutions I make to be the ones of the nature “I will try this”.  Some have led to life changes, others simply a ticked checkbox.  One of my 15 or so items for 2010 was “make my Caesar salad”.  I purchased the appropriate pieces and not quite willing to make my own dressing, started with a protosalad of romaine lettuce and Newman’s Own Caesar Salad dressing.  I added dressing, checked for coverage, added more, checked again, added more, and I think I hit the right amount of dressing.  I reachedthe bottom of the salad bowl and found a kiddie pool’s worth of salad dressing.  I then went through 3 more bowls of salad to go through the dressing.

I tried again today and anticipated the dressing trap, used about 1/2 as much, which still resulted in an excess of dressing.  I like Ranch dressing as I know when I’ve hit my target, but I can’t differentiate between freshly washed Romaine lettuce and dressing.  This may be a rare genetic/social deficiency like my inability to identify antecedents.  On the plus side, I’ve gone through two heads of Romaine lettuce trying to master what probably comes to humans naturally.  I haven’t been this regular in a while.