A lot has changed over the years, my years, changed with others, society, the world, and me. Those I grew up with and loving, the generations ahead of me, are all dead but one, and increasingly, more and most of my own generation of friends, loved ones, and associates. Summer is upon us, mid-summer that always takes me back in memories to my late teens and early to mid-twenties, stirred again this morning by an email from The New York Times titled "The Morning: Salad Days"

Summer’s bounty

I have spent more kitchen hours than I care to admit trying, in vain, to recreate the Caesar salad dressing of a certain Midtown Manhattan lunch spot.

Sometimes I go all in on the Parmesan. Other times I double the lemon juice. I’ve made my own oven-dried anchovy powder, left out the Worcestershire, added a sprinkle of MSG. I’ve convinced myself that if I can just get the formula correct, I’ll have a magic elixir I can dribble over any combination of vegetables and voilà, the perfect salad.

The dressing is not the problem. Or rather, it’s not the only problem with my salads. I’m a produce maximalist. I get carried away with the bounty of the season, selecting whatever looks good from the greenmarket, putting it all in one bowl, paying little mind to the salad commandments about balancing texture and acid. I have never chosen the right cheese.

Several years ago, Julia Moskin wrote in The Times about composed salads, which are arranged on a plate rather than tossed in a bowl. The ingredients in her recipe were suggestions rather than prescriptions: something leafy, something crunchy, something rich, a combo of raw and cooked vegetables. “Tossed together, the result would be sloppy and monotonous,” she cautioned. “A bit of order makes it satisfying and elegant.”

I tried it, but I always seemed to revert to excess: one big mingle-mangle, everybody in the pool. Over time I’ve come to realize that I need stricter recipes.

They don’t need to be overly involved: Eric Kim’s greens with carrot-ginger dressing, finished with mint. Genevieve Ko’s corn and tomato salad with basil and cilantro. These, and the rest of our summer salad recipes, are mostly very simple, their ingredients lists limited. (Same goes for Melissa Clark’s caprese recommendation below.) Of course chefs are invited to freestyle, but I plan to stick to the ingredients provided.

I asked a vegetable-savvy friend what separates a good salad from a great one. “Really good vinegar,” he said. What do you think? Tell me your summer salad secrets.

Melissa Kirsch, The New York Times, Saturday, July 16, 2022, "The Morning: Salad Days"

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The term the salad days refers to the periods of a person's youth when life was without worry. The phrase originated from the play Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare, which includes the line They were my salad days, when I was green in judgement.

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so, "salad days" - - for me it brings instantly to mind years beyond childhood and early teens moving into becoming a young man. Times and a Time of intense feelings, reservation, inexperience, tentative self-confidence, holding back, hesitance, innocence, ignorance, working my way into young adulthood. Embarking from university into marriage and becoming a young naval officer,

not from any sense of vocation, but what the hell else to do to avoid The Draft with a new Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree that I'd decided on years earlier on the spur of an afternoon's moment in order to avoid one of my father's "Talks" because he did not like my report card grades from the first semester of my pre-theology major. Gina understood, Walt remembers full well, and for the three of us, many of life's hours sitting captive as the object of "A Talk" is part of the luggage we take into eternity.

So, a U S Navy specialty where the other officers had the same degree, and morph into a career because it never occurred to me that all my Navy years would not be exactly like my first sea duty.

There we are tied up to a pier, as she was the day I first boarded her summer 1958.

There we are at sea, refueling underway alongside a larger ship. We had Malinda before that, while I was in a Navy school. Joe came along during the next tour, my first shore duty,

which made me begin to stir a little uneasily about what I had gotten myself into: though Navy for me was going well, it did not give me the satisfaction that sea duty had. I was twenty-five by then, about when "salad days" as a notion of a Time of life fades away.

Salad Days of summer. While reading Melissa Kirsch's piece, my mouth began to water about the Caesar salads I've had at Carrabba's PCB, and I got out my anchovies as an ingredient for fixing a proper salad to go with my enormous red rare beef patty at noon dinner Time today.

Life is Good and

Every Day Is A Beautiful Day

RSF&PTL

Looking back this morning, that