When I think of salad, I think of very fresh blend of various green leafs, an assortment of various vegetables perhaps and whatever else you may want to add into the salad. Usually a typical American salad that most people in the United States are use to are made of a combination of green Romanian lettuce and cut-up vegetables. The Lettuce, if fresh, is usually very green and tastes crunchy if it is the crunchy kind. If it is not the crunchy kind, it will not be hard and crunchy it will be smooth, and when you bite into it, it has a savory leathery feel to it.
The other ingredients that you could add to a salad which are usually in most salads people eat are vegetables. The vegetables most commonly used are carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and possibly zucchini. Carrots are an orange color, and when in salads usually they are in little think strips or just cut up in chunks about half an inch wide. The carrots are usually freshly washed, if made well, which means they will be somewhat wet still. They are also usually very crunchy if they are fresh carrots, so fresh that when you bite into them you hear a cracking noise, but carrots are very healthy for you and are tasty if you enjoy them. Cucumbers are more of a green vegetable, with a darker and harder green outer skin. The skin is tough, but not so tough that you can’t eat it and not enjoy it. Inside the skin the rest of the vegetable is hard but not as hard as the skin and is a lighter green color than the skin. There are also seeds inside the middle of the cucumber that are also edible. Cucumbers are not my favorite vegetable, the flavor is very bland, but some people do enjoy them. Tomatoes are very red in color and also have somewhat of a skin on them, but their skin is very thin and not tough at all. Once the skin of a tomato has been protruded, the inside is very juicy with seeds that are also edible. People usually cut tomatoes up in chunks for their salad, or just usually use a smaller type of tomato that looks like a miniaturized tomato. Tomatoes also aren’t very appealing to me because they have a somewhat sweet taste, but aren’t appealing to me and are also somewhat bland. The last type of vegetable that usually is in salads that the common person that I know eats would be a zucchini. Zucchini has a hard outer skin like most of the other vegetables I mentioned that go into salads, and the inside of zucchinis are somewhat hard as well, but softer then the shell. They also like the other vegetables, have seeds inside that are edible. Zucchinis have a bland taste to me as well; sometimes some zucchinis have a sour aftermath once I swallow it.
Once the basic elements of the salad have been prepared and mixed together, one may put some sort of sauce/dressing topping on it to add flavoring or just as another ingredient. Typically the dressing is usually creamy and thick; dressings are meant to add another dimension to the flavor. The dressings usually have so many different flavors in every bite; some flavors are very sweet, while others are very sour and bitter. Once again, it is all in the personal preference of the person which is going to eat the salad.
Salads have been around for many thousands of years, maybe not the same type that we think of today with all the various ingredients that we put into them, but the basic element of the lettuce has been around for centuries. Salads have developed with different cultures just like everything else has done in society, that’s why there are so many different ingredients which can be added which have so many different flavors and aspects to the salad. One thing I am sure about though is that a salad is a very tasty combination of foods that once brought together are almost like a utopian state-of-mind for the mouth. It would take me too long to sit and type out every food item that goes into a salad and then describe them, simply because in a salad one can add whatever they would like to eat with it. In a salad world, there are no limitations for the taste-buds.
