The Quintessence of Salad

I love the word "quintessence."  Meaning the perfect embodiment of something, the word just sounds right to me.  I even remember when I first heard the word.  It was in my senior year of high school, and I was writing a term paper about George Bernard Shaw.  One of the Shavian works I researched was called "The Quintessence of Ibsenism."  I looked up the word then, was taken by it, and have liked it ever since.

I also love salad.  Not all salad, mind you, but many of them.  I am still not overwhelmed by basic garden salads with things like grapes or raisins or mandarin oranges added.  Linda likes adding things like that, and I eat them, although, I believe that when the first salad chefs were thinking about salads, there was a reason that they  came up with separate "garden" and "fruit" varieties.

In this post, I would like to name my choice as the "quintessence of salad" available in the greater Syracuse area.  First, I would like to mention my second favorite local salad.  It is the "House Salad" served at Hullar's in Fayetteville.  Always crisp, fresh, and tasty, the Hullar salad demonstrates excellence in locally produced green cuisine.  But the quintessence of salad, the perfect embodiment, for me, anyway, is created at the Olive Garden on Erie Boulevard.  Now, I know that the Olive Garden is a chain, and therefore suspect to some.  And I don't know if their pastas are terribly lacking when compared to those found in Rome or Tuscany.  But I do know that their salad is a gustatory triumph.

I have one of those crazy memories that stick in your mind for no good reason about salad at the Olive Garden.  Fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was talking, in school, to Heather Ozinsky. Heather mentioned she had been to the Olive Garden the day before, and I said how much we liked the place.  Heather nodded her head and sagely said, "Great salad!"  To this day, I agree.