By Chef Alexis Hernandez
When a Salad Shows Up
I made the salad because I felt guilty about skipping greens.
All week, dinner’s been nothing but a grilled piece of chicken or beef on a plate.
Boring? Sure. But sometimes boring feels like comfort.
Tonight, though, I figured a salad might quiet the guilt.
It started as an afterthought: arugula, a few slices of day-old bread, maybe a quick vinaigrette.
Then I spotted half a log of goat cheese hiding in the fridge.
A lemon, mostly stripped bare of its rind from the martinis I’ve been making all week and still had just enough juice to pull through.
I threw it all together while Misa—my dog—stared at me, and the wine was already open and breathing.
The vinaigrette came out sharp and citrusy, squeezed from that same tired lemon, ( Here is one of my favorite vinaigrettes)
But I did toast the bread—I needed some texture. I’m not an animal.
I made dinner with what I had in the fridge
I didn’t miss the protein and didn’t even sit down to eat the salad.
It was enough. Because I was hungry and tired and standing barefoot in the kitchen with a salad that simply showed up.
That’s the kind of meal I like sometimes when I don’t want to do much. It actually looked better than it had any right to—and it tasted good, too.
And the next day, when I toasted the leftover bread and rubbed it with garlic confit—the kind I always keep nearby—that felt like a gift, too.
(If you’ve never made garlic confit, this will convert you).
What I learned wasn’t about the salad.
It was about noticing when something simple satisfies you.
About not apologizing when your dinner isn’t plated, or cooked, or hot. It’s still dinner.
At least it was for me, in that moment.
And if Misa thought otherwise, he kept it to himself.
Chef Alexis Hernandez writes The Other Side of the Stove. His work has also appeared in News of Sun City Center and South County, and he has appeared on Food Network Star and Cutthroat Kitchen.
