The iceberg lettuce that is. The lettuce that is so trashed these days. The lettuce that remains my fav, in spite of me growing attempting to grow other lettuces, red and green lettuces, in spite of buying bags of lettuces that someone else has grown and washed and packaged. I adore the iceberg.
Back in the day a lettuce salad used to be a big bowl of chopped lettuce and tomato, grated carrot and cheese, maybe some chopped hardboiled egg mixed in there, some cucumber perhaps, in fact whatever you liked, with mayonnaise on the top. That is what my grandmother used to make.
Then somehow, a lettuce salad became a pile of weeds. Some of them okay. Some actually quite vile.
Now, I am not against the weeds. I quite like rocket, it's quite tasty, and I have actually been known to grow it. I think some of the types of lettuce you grow are quite good, especially those ones where you can go out and just pick a few leaves without having to dig up the whole thing.
BUT. I really like iceberg lettuce the most. It is just the best.
It is crunchy and juicy, it has a nice mild flavour. Or maybe it doesn't have a flavour, but I don't mind. They say it doesn't have the nutritional value of other lettuces. Take this information from livestrong.com. for example on how pathetic iceberg (supposedly) is. Vitamin A per cup - romaine provides more than 10 times the vitamin A of an iceberg lettuce. Vit K - The darker-colored romaine lettuce contains 48 micrograms of vitamin K, while iceberg lettuce contains 17 micrograms.
Well, I don't even know what vitamin K is. In fact, I don't really care about that, micrograms, schmicograms.
Tonight I will make a lettuce salad of iceberg, all chopped up, and slices of tomato, with grated carrot and a basic edam or cheddar cheese, and maybe even a diced hard boiled egg, and lots of yummy mayonnaise. A huge massive bowl of it. In fact, I might even have it for lunch instead, it sounds so delish.
As an aside, just so you don't think I'm completely unsophisticated (although I actually am), I was out with my friends, the Cocktail Girls, last weekend and we were down at the Viaduct at the waterfront, a gorgeous Auckland afternoon and my meal had a "salad" of mint and parsley to accompany it. It was actually rather nice and tasty, as you would expect mint to be, but just quietly, and I didn't dare voice this in the public domain and certainly not to the restaurant people, I thought that a token leaf of iceberg, nicely diced in with the herbs, would have made it just a little bit better.
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