Daily Dose of English 65
Salads
Daily Dose of English 65
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about salads. And often, underappreciated food that I quite like. And I think it would be fun to talk about salads today, especially because I've been eating a lot of salads recently. So just the definition of salad is a kind of food that you eat that has a base of typically lettuce or some other green type, usually a vegetable. So a vegetable, let's say. And then there's a bunch of other things in it. And the main part of a salad is the dressing, or I guess the second main part. But the thing that makes a salad is that it has a dressing. I guess, so that's how I describe a salad. Something with a base, typically of lettuce or a vegetable, and then a bunch of toppings and a dressing to combine everything together. A dressing is sort of like the salad sauce, but we don't call it sauce for a salad, we specifically say that it's a salad dressing, and you typically put it all over your salad, and maybe even extra if you really like it, and then you eat the salad like that. And salads are, you're able to find salads absolutely everywhere in pretty much every restaurant, all sorts of different kinds of salads. They can be big, small, green, brown. You can have any kind of salad. So might as well talk about some of them. The most typical kind of salad that you'll find, in the US at least, is a green salad or a garden salad, which is some sort of lettuce and then maybe other greens like that, arugula or spinach are also fairly common, plus some simple toppings, typically some more vegetables, maybe some broccoli or bell peppers or something like that, and then a dressing on top. They're usually pretty simple, you don't think about them too much and they're often not that good. The dressing is the most important part of a lot of those garden green salads because otherwise it just has no flavor and it's not very good. And so there's a lot of different kinds of dressings that are popular in the U.S. Ranch being the most popular one, but there's also a couple other brands like, not brands, but flavors. A Thousand Island, actually that is a brand. Thousand Island is a brand of dressing. There's Italian dressing. That's not a brand, that's just a sort of a style. There's others that I can't think of right now, but those are the main ones. And what you'll find, especially in restaurants and in people's fridges, is that kind of salad dressing. But if you're making a salad at home, you can also make your own dressing and they're really easy and can be a lot more delicious and way healthier if you do it that way. But I'm getting a little bit off track because there's also a pretty common, other kinds of salads are also pretty common in restaurants. And they usually have a name to signify kind of what's on them and tell you, okay, this is the kind of salad you're ordering. Some that I can think of off the top of my head are a Caesar salad. Caesar salads are, again, base of lettuce, but there's typically croutons on top. Croutons are the crunchy pieces of bread that are small and fried. Those are croutons. You get croutons. Occasionally they'll put on fish, so anchovies on Caesar salad, and then Parmesan cheese. Sometimes you can have other things on your Caesar salad, but that's the typical one you'll find with Caesar dressing. However, Caesar salad made the kind of traditional way is one of my favorite foods in general. Caesar salad is very, very good, but I don't really like the bottle version. I'm much a bigger fan of homemade Caesar dressing, which uses things like limes and oil and Parmesan cheese, pepper, stuff like that to make a much more delicious kind of Caesar salad. And then you can put it on a whole leaf. So instead of having small pieces of lettuce, you can have an entire leaf that you dip into the dressing and then eat that way. And it's really, really good. And so Caesar salad's really good, is my opinion. You can also find cob salads. Cob salads are fairly common. And I don't know exactly what they have, honestly, but it's something like ham and a boiled egg and olives and something else. They're pretty popular because they're a bit bigger. People like having a salad that can be your whole meal. And so a cob salad is fairly common for that. Oh yeah, a lot of restaurants do chicken Caesar salad, so you can get your Caesar salad with chicken to make it a bit more of a full meal. Same thing, you can also find chef salads, which are pretty similar to a cob salad, but with different stuff on top, and a bunch of other things like that. And so there's tons of different salads that you can find on restaurant menus. However, in my experience, they're usually not that good, which is too bad. I think a lot of restaurants take salads for granted, right? They think, oh, I don't like salad that much. And so that means salad just isn't really for me. But that means that everybody who does like salad likes any kind of salad. It doesn't have to be a good salad. I'll just make whatever and I'll put it on the menu. However, this just ends up with sort of not as great salad in general, and so people don't order it, and so then the restaurant thinks, oh yeah, people just don't like salad, I guess we'll focus on these other things, rather than trying to improve their salads with more interesting or better dressings, with better toppings, with more options for salads, because they are really good. And so if you want to enjoy a salad, I definitely recommend making it yourself because they're very easy and they're really good and they're quite healthy. And that ease is the thing that I want to drive home because I've been eating salads a lot. Actually, drive home, let's talk about that verb for a second because it kind of sounds weird. Why am I driving you home? That's weird. To drive something home is to make it very clear and to make somebody understand. And so if I'm driving home the point that salads are easy, I'm going to give you examples of why it's so easy. because in my opinion, salads are one of the easiest foods that you can make that tastes really good. And so how I make a salad is I grab some lettuce and I put it in a bowl. I kind of tear it up to smaller pieces and then I throw on top some toppings. So right now I've been doing goat cheese. It's really easy and delicious. I've been doing some nuts and just crushed up pecan nuts is great. Then I put on some dried cranberries. Any kind of like small dried fruit can work for this. And then a little bit of fresh fruit is really, really nice. And then if you have something that's a little acidic in your fridge and so like some cut up pickles or onions like that can be really good for this. And then putting on just a very simple dressing of what I do is olive oil and then lime juice and that's it. Then I just mix things together and I eat that. And it's really, really good because I think part of the reason that it's so good is that it's so quick. I can throw a salad together like that in less than five minutes and then I have a delicious bowl of stuff to eat and it's satisfying and it feels good to eat and it's healthy and then I can have something small to finish my dinner. Typically I do want to eat something else right it's not the only thing that I want to eat in a day but like it's a really good start and so I do maybe a salad plus a chicken quesadilla or I do a salad and some salmon or What else have I done? I did a salad and a burger the other day. That was great. Because sometimes you want a little bit more than your main dish, but you don't want to spend a whole bunch of time to make something and work on it and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And so a salad is a really nice way to do that. Before I run out of time in this episode, I wanna talk about a couple of other kinds of salad that are popular in the U.S., just to give you some of that insight, I guess, and talk a bit more about the U.S., because something is pretty popular in the U.S. called, wait, what's it called? Oh, pasta salad, jeez. Pasta salad is where you make salad, but instead of using lettuce, you use pasta, and you put other things in it. It's usually made for events or parties, things like that, because it's a nice side dish, a thing to have next to your burger or your hot dog or your main dish. And so it makes a good side dish. However, a lot of people don't do a very good job with it because it's, again, one of those things where they think, oh, people just like this, right? It's just good. However, it ends up kind of being not very good. And so, if you have the option to try a good pasta salad, definitely do it. It's really yummy. However, if it doesn't look very good, you're probably not missing that much. And the last kind of salad is fruit salad that I want to mention. It's called fruit salad, and that's just cut up fruit and thrown into a bowl. There's nothing else about it. It's not really salad-like. Because with pasta salad, you do sort of make a salad. However, with fruit salad, it's just cut up fruit put into a bowl. And so I don't really know why we call it fruit salad, but we do. So yeah. Anyways, that's been my episode on salads. I hope that you learned a few things and enjoyed this episode. If you did, let me know down in the comments what kind of salad you like to eat. But that's everything from me, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye-bye. Have a good one.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.