Bitter Winter Salad
Photo: Carolina Ayala / Contributor
I just returned from a trip to India, where I ate many a wonderful meal. Prawn balchao in Goa, a Gujarati thali in Mumbai, an unctuous beef shank in Delhi and so on but the one thing I seldom encountered in a restaurant or even home was a simple crisp green salad. Lettuce has only arrived in the fancier urban grocery stores in India in the last 5 to 8 years so salads are not a part of the everyday diet of Indians. When I was growing up, a salad at the table constituted sliced cabbage with sliced tomatoes or radishes over it with a squeeze of lime juice.
The first thing I wanted to inhale upon my return was a big green salad. And in the winter particularly, I like to enjoy salads made with bitter greens like radicchio, or endive particularly when they are balanced with something sweet like maple syrup, oranges, or pomegranates. I add serrano to this salad because particularly during colder months, our bodies need foods that produce heat to maintain strong digestion.