When the depression salad hits

On bottled dressing as an antidote to perfectionism

Hi everyone,

I’m keeping it short today because I’m struggling with a cold and generally feeling the depression blues.

Last night I popped into the fancy grocery store around the corner from my apartment to pick up a rotisserie chicken that I had every intention of making into a nice salad for dinner. Between food poisoning and a cold, I had been struggling to cook all week, relying on a lot of canned soup and takeout meals and random stuff on crackers, and I’d decided A Nice Salad was exactly what I needed.

I remembered I had washed Little Gem lettuce and sliced radishes leftover from the week before that I had stored in a tupperware (how thoughtful of me!) and was feeling smugly self-satisfied by my resourcefulness, my planning ahead, my economy. I had a heel of very stale, very hard sourdough bread that would be perfect for homemade croutons—I just needed to run the bread under water, reheat it in the oven until it was soft again, tear the revived bread into pieces, dress those pieces with olive oil and salt, and bake them into croutons. Easy! As for salad dressing, perhaps from-scratch Caesar was a little too ambitious, but surely I could manage a mayo-based “lazy Caesar” that only required me to grate garlic, mash anchovies, juice a lemon, and whisk in a little oil to emulsify. As Ina would say, “How easy is that?”

It turns out when I am moving through a depressive episode, literally none of those things are easy.

I think my body knew this before my mind, because I had one of those fugue-state grocery runs in which items I normally never buy were magically materializing in my basket: jarred queso, bottled Caesar dressing, a bag of croutons, an individual cup of rice pudding. I got to the rotisserie station and found out it had closed down for the night. I bought two wan grilled chicken breasts from the prepared foods case instead; I was clearly still determined to realize my salad fantasy.

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It wasn’t until I pulled the container of lettuce out of the fridge and realized everything inside was frozen that the meltdown hit and I went into full table-flip mode for about 30 seconds. I realized just how much stock I had put into making sure this salad fantasy went according to plan, and how bottled dressing and bagged croutons and now frozen lettuce inexplicably made me feel like a failure. Perfectionism is funny and insidious in this way. It can make you believe the (probably too-high) standards you set for yourself on your best days should be static, unchanging, and apply to your worst days, too.

I’m lucky to have a partner who reminds me often to be kinder to myself on the days I need it most. He cubed the chicken breast and an avocado, I washed and chopped a head of lettuce, picked out the only not-frozen radish slices from the tupperware, cut up three floppy spears of gray-green blanched asparagus from five days ago, and tossed it all in a large bowl with toasted sunflower seeds, the croutons, the bottled dressing, and a little lemon, salt, and many grinds of pepper.

Was it the best salad I’ve ever eaten? No. But it was A Nice Salad. And it was exactly what I needed.

See you all on Thursday—this week’s recipe drop is for my very favorite lentil salad, which has been a beloved lunchtime companion for years.

(And if you’re currently going through it too, I hope you can find ways to make things easier on yourself. Because you deserve ease.)

—Chaey