salad. ur doin it wrong.

Tonight I forced myself to eat a cucumber when I was supposed to be eating lettuce, just to see what would happen. As I did so, I began to suspect that I might be doing salad wrong.

I construct beautiful salads. Tonight I marinated halved grape tomatoes, black olives, cucumbers, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts in balsamic vinegar and placed them over a bed of spring mix dressed with light Italian. This masterpiece completed, I then ate every stitch of lettuce out from under the other vegetables before eating anything else, save for that one errant cucumber.

I have a thing about eating foods "in order." I don't need foods separated on my plate, and indeed I toss things together in salads or pastas pretty regularly. It's what happens next that's a little odd.

I generally eat foods I like least first, and those I like most last, but there's more to it than that. If I had a plate with potatoes, brussels sprouts and pork, for example, I would eat the foods in that order. If I have chicken and broccolli fettuccini alfredo, on the other hand, it's broccolli, then chicken, then pasta, because the logistics of eating pasta and leaving chicken don't work.

Similarly, tonight I ate artichoke hearts and black olives before eating roasted red peppers, even though I like artichokes and olives more than peppers, because the peppers were all tiny and stuck to the bottom of the plate, and it made the most sense to just scoop them up at the end.

Of course, that rule also has exceptions. Croutons always come last, and I look forward to them literally the whole time I eat any salad containing them. Even finely shredded cheese comes before croutons, because croutons are last, period.

I would love to hear other people's little rules and peculiarities when it comes to eating. Eating is so personal, and we do it so often, that I think each person has to have their own strange little "things" about it. Or maybe I'd just like to feel less weird about mine.