Greek Salad, Pseudo-Rustic Style

When I’m a bit hung over, I sometimes crave salad. I know this is rather unusual since most people crave hamburgers or sausages or something along those lines, but I have a theory as to why it happens – tomatoes and cucumber contain a lot of water, which is what the body needs when you are hung over. And if the salad contains something salty such as Feta and/or olives, then all the better.

As it turned out, I was not actually hung over this morning, but I did spend a lot of time running around in the sun yesterday, chasing a little red ball all over a rather large field without much success, so was a bit dehydrated today. And I woke up thinking about Feta, which I haven’t really thought about for a while and can only have been caused by one thing – watching the final episode of Jamie Oliver’s “Jamie Does…” series last week, which was in Greece.

There seems to have been something of a pattern to these programmes – in each country that he visits, he will make a “main” dish, a fish dish or starter, a soup and a salad. At least that is the way that it has seemed in those that I have watched. In Greece of course, the salad had to be Greek salad.

We didn’t have all of the ingredients, so the salad that I made wasn’t quite the same as his, but it was close. My ingredients were:

Three different types of tomatoes, sliced “rusticly”. I remember on the programme he said something like “you really want it to look home made”. Of course it will look home made; I’m making it at home. Grr. Anyway.
Red onion, sliced very thinly.
Cucumber, scraped decoratively with a fork and then sliced.
Olives, preferably decent ones – mine were quite boring and plasticky as I couldn’t find decent ones this morning.
Fresh mint, oregano and parsley. Jamie used mint and dill, but we didn’t have dill.
Dried oregano
Dressing – lemon juice, good olive oil, salt and pepper.
A slice of Feta, kept whole
(Jamie also added sliced green pepper, which we didn’t have)

Mix all of the vegetables and fresh herbs together, dress with the dressing and toss, with your fingers of course. Then put the piece of Feta on top, sprinkle with the dried oregano and drizzle with some more olive oil.

This was delicious, just what I was after and perfect for eating in the garden on a beautifully sunny day like today. I had actually forgotten that we had dried oregano and hadn’t added it, but Kerri reminded me and I was glad that she did because it added a lovely fragrance to the salad. I thought it would be a bit unwieldy to have the Feta in one large piece, but you can of course break bits off with your fork as you go if it’s a one-person salad. If it is for more people then it probably would be unwieldy.

I shall certainly try variations on this theme in the future – I particularly like the idea of using more than one variety of tomato in a salad. I love tomatoes and usually buy different varieties from one week to the next, but I don’t remember every purposefully making a salad with more than one variety before. Hopefully the summer will last, to give me reasons to make it!