Salad Days

The weather was mild today and sunny. Generally, that means one thing to me: salad. So I happily went vegetable-shopping with my 3-year-old son running riot in the supermarket – every mother’s dread come true. I also bought a fine basil plant that came all the way from New Zealand and landed in Macau’s Park’n’Shop. The bag promises that the plant has never been sprayed, and I believe everything I read.

At the moment it is happily sitting on the kitchen window sill, waiting for some rays of sun to shine its way. The instructions on the bag said not too much water and no drafts, but how much is not too much? Whenever my mother buys plants, she insists that they’re parched and runs water over them for about 5 minutes before saying, “There, don’t they look happy now?”

But I am not my mother and I was brought up following instructions to a T, so until otherwise enlightened, I shall water my basil plant just a little. I feel like I’m quite the green thumb now, with my plant in the window. I snipped some leaves for my lovely salad and suddenly felt as though I had grown up in Italy all my life. Italian green thumb – that’s me.

So, my delectable salad (please refer to insert) included hand-shredded lettuce, basil, diced tomato, cucumber moons (by that I mean cucumber slices cut in two), and then I sprinkled the top with pine nuts from China, sweetened dried cranberries from Canada, cashews from the local market (probably from China), and drizzled the whole with Kraft Caesar dressing from Australia. I hadn’t meant it to be such an international mix, but that’s how it turned out.

Yum.