Cooking: Salad Daze

WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- I have to be careful -- I can get quite lyrical about salads. It's probably because they've undergone such a radical makeover since I was a child.

Then, salads meant summer school lunch. We would peer despondently into bowls containing a muddle of soft, creased lettuce leaves, too-thick slices of cucumber, quarters of graying hard boiled egg, other quarters of tasteless tomato, their seeds sagging like frogs' spawn into the mass, all stained a virulent vermilion from slices of cold beetroot leaking into everything.

These days, salads are more like an '80s rock star's hairstyle - crisp and tangled, looking wild and spiky on a huge flat plate. A Jon Bon Jovi or a Debbie Harry kind of confection. There's not much of lettuce about them and certainly nothing that leaks.

The best ones make full meals and take very little time to throw together. Some of them, like the Chicken Tarragon below, actively benefit from living it up in the fridge overnight.

The Thais understand about salads-as-meals. They put together a medley of the crunchy and soft with the spicy and sour, then toss on top a handful of grilled shrimp, shavings of barbecued pork or pieces of marinated chicken. While the precise ingredients are pretty much up to personal taste -- bearing in mind the need for contrast in sensations -- the dressing is very carefully constructed.

Take a clean screw-top jar and pour into it 4 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice, 1 tablespoon Thai fish sauce, 1 tablespoon sugar, preferably brown, 1 tablespoon sesame oil, 3 tablespoons vegetable or light olive oil, 1 clove of garlic finely minced, 1 chili, deseeded and finely sliced, and 16 grinds of fresh black pepper. Shake the whole lot up until ready to use.

For a Thai beef salad, throw flank steak onto the barbecue or a grill pan for five minutes each side. Let it rest for 15 minutes, then slice thinly across the grain.

In a big bowl, combine whatever you enjoy from the following: baby spinach, arugula, snow peas that have been boiled for one minute then made immediately cool in cold water, do the same to green beans, finely sliced Chinese cabbage, finely sliced rings of baby carrot, and spring onions sliced on the diagonal.

Essential are one large handful fresh cilantro leaves, one small handful of fresh mint leaves roughly chopped, and one large handful of bean sprouts. Muddle the beef into it, pour over enough sauce to really moisten it then give it all a toss with your clean hands.

Chicken Tarragon Salad needs a boneless, skinless chicken breast per person, a handful of toasted walnut or pecan halves, and a cup of seedless red grapes.

Combine all these together in a bowl, grind over plenty of black pepper. In a separate bowl, mix together 5 tablespoons of mayonnaise, 1/4 pint sour cream and enough fresh tarragon to make a tablespoonful when finely chopped. Pour it over the chicken and toss it all well to coat. Let the flavors develop by making this a day or even two before you want it. When ready to serve, tear the leaves of a Butter lettuce into a serving bowl, then pour the chicken over all.

A really simple last minute salad that goes well with slices of prosciutto or salami is a head of celery, well washed and very thinly sliced from top to bottom including leaves and all but that last sliver of root, slices 1/4 thick across four endive, and paper thin slices of one large fennel root, saving the fronds for decoration.

Mix them all together on a large flat plate. Push torn-up

strips of prosciutto into it at random, then squeeze over all the juice of a lemon and a good glug of extra virgin olive oil, followed by several grinds of black pepper and some salt. Then muss your own hair like Bon Jovi and eat up.