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.