A Happy Salad is More Than a Bowl of Greens

As a defiant response to sad desk lunches, the Food52 team works to keep our midday meals both interesting and pretty. Each week, we'll be sharing our happiest desk lunches—and we want to see yours, too.

Today: Don't make greens carry all the weight of your salad's success. Plump it up with extra cheese and nuts.

Great cooks—and aspiring great cooks—steal. Case in point: I was at a dinner the other week that included a salad demo. My friend and I stood and watched, thinking everyone knows how to make a salad (cooks on their path to greatness can also be dissenting before they steal; cooks also can be real jerks), until they got to the point when they added the cheese: a veritable mountain of French feta, in what looked like a 1:1 cheese to greens ratio. And until the point when they added the nuts: Another massive heap, a peak to the feta’s mountain, was tumbled into the bowl.

And so yes, naturally, you email post-event to get the real recipe, but you also appropriate this wisdom to make all of your salads from this day forth much happier than they were. Do you think you’ve added enough nuts and cheese? Double both.

Keep doing this—salad lunch after salad lunch—until you find the next tip to steal. Then incorporate that one, too.

Photo by Kenzi Wilbur