… but no worse for it, certainly!
The idea for the salad originated when, in search of a bag of lentils at the local supermarket, I wandered facefirst into a refrigerated display of Greek cheeses, a veritable cornucopia of several kinds of feta and halloumi. My mouth watered instantly and there I was, holding a packet of each, good feta and halloumi, and staring around in a suddenly hungrily-urgent need of other various salad ingredients.
The thing with feta is, it is very hard to mess up a salad which involves it. I suppose the imaginative could do so, on purpose, but the crumbly and fresh tangy-saltiness of it really does go with many things, and I attribute the popularity of the traditional Greek salad to feta (mostly). One mustn’t forget Kalamata olives – which I managed to forget while frantically picking up red onions and other things necessary for a weekend’s worth of food with possible guests. It is the lack of those, and a lemon, that makes this a generic Med salad rather than a proper Greek one. Thankfully, Tobias’ fridge held a jar of green olives and a jar of nonpareil capers, all of which got gleefully used, mixed and eaten.
Salad Ingredients (to serve two hungry people a large lunch):
- Two (large and greedy) handfuls of fresh arugula
- Two rather fat vine-ripened tomatoes
- A chunk off a cucumber
- Half a red onion
- Pack of said feta cheese
- A few forkfuls of capers packed in brine or vinegar
- As many green olives as I had patience to fish out of the tall and narrow (!) jar with a fork in my starved-after-walk-in-the-snow state
- Salt and olive oil in quantity to taste (or in other words, enough extra-virgin olive oil to light up Solomon’s temple)
(I actually also had a pot of thyme that I had planned to clip some off and add to said salad, but in our feeding frenzy, I have forgotten. Some fresh thyme would not go amiss here, and neither would some flat-leaf parsley.)
Instruction:
- Chop all choppables.
- Dump all ingredients into bowl.
- Salt and pour oil over. Mix.
- Eat (that’s the important bit!).
Tobias toasted some Swedish wheat flatbread to go with this, in lieu of pittas, which worked fantastically well as a side. Om nom nom!
Eat The Roses 
No, no!
One hungry person a decent-sized salad. ;)
P.S. if you did use all the olives, why fish them from the jar? Tip ’em out!
I will agree about one person if it were dinner, but it had been a late, late lunch! <3
I didn't want to use all the olives, just however many I managed to get out of a jar (though I might have, had they been Kalamata – I am less of a fan of the green ones…)!