Mark Bittman's "Salted" Chopped Salad ♥

Today's new vegetable salad recipe: Mark Bittman's chopped salad recipe, the one from last week's New York Times, the kind of salad you can make every few days, adding and subtracting vegetables as you see fit. Healthy. Low carb. Low points. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real".

Michael Pollan's new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is on my read-soon wishlist. It rethinks our adventures in the kitchen, following four elemental ways of cooking.

FIRE That's captured fire like a gas or electric stove or the open flame of wood fire.
WATER That's boiling and braising.
AIR That's baking. (Have you ever thought of an oven as just a small furnace? Me either.) It's also air-drying thin-thin layers of meat, say, as the Swiss and other Europeans do.
EARTH That's the action of fermentation, whether cooking up some homebrew or making cheese.

Peeling and chopping, slicing and dicing, these are the constants of a vegetable lover's kitchen, the acts that come before Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. This salad takes more than the usual measure, leaving time to consider which element of cooking would be applied here, when salt is applied to "cook" the vegetables just enough to soften and infuse with freshness and flavor. I suppose, yes, it must be "Earth"?
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