Salad No. 1

I have tons of apples and a new rule to use walnuts every day to make my menu magic. That means turning to this book from the Culinary Arts Institute, 1951, for a ham and apple salad for lunch.

Ham and Apple Salad
1 1/2 cups diced ham
1 1/2 cups diced apple
1/2 c chopped celery
1 head lettuce or romaine, shredded
mustard French dressing

Combine all ingredients, adding enough dressing to coat, toss together in salad bowl. Serves six.

What is mustard French dressing? It's this:

1 cup olive oil
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 t salt
few grains cayenne (don't get carried away here, one extra grain and you might taste it)
1/4 t white pepper
2 T chopped parsley
2 t prepared mustard

Combine and beat or shake thoroughly before using. Makes 1 1/4 cups. Rub the bowl with a crushed clove of garlic before adding salad. (Then chew the clove so that you'll actually get some garlic flavor in your salad.)

Or in my case, it's something out of a bottle with a little mustard added--for the sake of speed--that probably bears as little resemblance to the real thing in taste as it does to any real food substance, given the list of ingredients on the label.

And it's not a bad combination at all, notice I threw in some walnuts. Mmmm, I can taste Tinkerbell dancing on my tongue. Apparently she hasn't taken a bath in awhile. Thank you Culinary Arts Institute for giving me 482 new salads. I won't say 500 because 18 of them are for molded salads. In my book, if you mold it, it isn't salad. It's either sweet and fruity which makes it dessert, or it's got vegetables and/or meat in it which makes it an abomination. And I'm highly suspicious of the frozen salads too.