Salad. Boring? Only if you get it wrong. There is something supremely and uniquely satisfying in an accomplished salad because in one there is nowhere to hide. Leaves aren’t just leaves — they must be well dressed, they should have been properly grown.
To dismiss salad as a throwaway or secondary dish is to misunderstand its very nature. A herbaceous medley from a good producer — Trill Farm in Devon, perhaps, or Sam Buckley of Where the Light Gets In, who grows interesting varieties of lettuces and more on the roof of a car park in Stockport — are incomparable to vacuous arrangements emptied out of supermarket bags.
