Visuals play an important role in food service, especially when we are dining out. But everyday food is hardly beautiful. Our daily cooking is normally dhal, vegetables or meat, rice and chappatis. At the most, the colors might vary from orange to red to brown. So what is visually appetising to show? We may use an attractive cutlery for plating to give an aesthetic presentation but there is nothing impressive unless we add colors and styles to the plates, which of course is possible when making salads on the side.
Besides having their nutritious value, salad add artistic look on our dining tables, and we can get as creative as we wish. Salads are the complimentary addition to our food. Raw vegetables have such attractive colors, and using vegetables of contrast colors like red, blue, purple, orange, adds beauty to the dish.
For salads to look beautiful, we make patterns arranging veggies, horizontally, diagonally or in haphazard manner. We add borders using chips or vegetable of same color, chop or slice finely the vegetables in different shapes to make designs, use fancy plates for presentation and so on
But we need taste too, just adding salt and black pepper is not enough, we like drama, dressing, herbs, flavors, textures, etc.
Reetha Balsavar specialises in creative and nutritious salads.
She recalls of the time, some 25 years ago, friends who she grew up with, asked her, to show them, how to make interesting salads. They normally would slice some tomatoes, cucumbers and onions sprinkle it with lemon juice and salt and call it a salad. So she invited a group of them for dinner.
“I remember I had made 20 different salads with about 10 different dressings. One of my friends had smuggled some biryani – thinking “how can salads fill you up”. And though I say so myself, the dinner was a huge success, no one was hungry after, and no one ate the biryani !” she reminisces, “All my friends took down the recipes, but I don’t think they bothered trying them out, it was easier asking me to send them a salad whenever they needed one.”
After retiring from IT in 2006, she started volunteering with Navdanya, an India-based non-governmental organisation which promotes organic farming, the rights of farmers, and the process of seed saving. Reetha has good knowledge of indoor and outdoor plants and often uses home grown herbs in her salads,
One day, her friend suggested that she could cater to office goers and send them salads for lunch. She was apprehensive, but thought, she could give it a go. The first week she received orders from very close friends and relatives, but the second week on, she was making 200 salads a week, and has never looked back since.
Reetha Balsavar specialises in making healthy, seasonal salads, as an alternate to a complete meal for lunch or dinner. She has a fortnightly menu of 3 vegetarian salads and 3 non vegetarian salads. She purposely changes it, every 15 days, because then she can use locally sourced seasonal produce. For example in January she made salads with tender jowar – (ponk) and in February when strawberries were abundant many of her salads featured that. In May it is mangoes both ripe and raw.
She also cooks complete non-Indian meals for parties like Italian, Thai, Parsi, German, French, British, Mexican, Lebanese, Greek, Moroccan, Spanish, Hungarian, and American to name but a few.
She shares about the unforgettable food that she ate long ago but still craves for it.
“I went to a Parsi school in Bandra, it is a school for both day scholar and borders. So I used to eat in the dining hall. Once a month we would get a Vaal Papdi, (flat green beans), vegetable served with Brun pav (crusty bread) and fried dried Bombil (Bombay duck). It is almost 50 years since I graduated from school, but that meal is something I will never forget. Luckily my classmate is now the administrator for the borders at my school. And just last Sunday a bunch of us classmates went to visit her, and she had arranged for us to have lunch in our dining hall, and she had made, the same Papdi vegetable with pav. A more than 50 year old memory came flooding back, and I was that little girl in my school uniform having lunch with my classmates.” A happy memory indeed.
Growing up in Mumbai, Reetha’s father worked in aviation industry, so travelling extensively was the part of her childhood. Everybody has one memorable eureka moment of the first taste of good food, Reetha talks about her holiday at Tuscany, Italy with her family.
‘We had hired a car and were driving through beautiful Italian villages. Our route was plotted by restaurants recommended by the Michelin Guide. But this one day it was raining heavily and our progress was slow. We would not have reached the restaurant we had picked in time for lunch. As we were driving along, we saw many cars parked outside a small place, with a “Food served here”, sign outside. As we were hungry we decided to stop and have lunch there. The place turned out to be an old railway station now converted to a restaurant. The tables there were long and every one sat around them, in a communal manner. The meal of the day was Pasta e Fagioli Soup, which was a pasta, pork, beans and vegetable soup served with freshly baked bread. I have never forgotten that meal and have tried to replicate it many times. In fact my family remember that meal more than any of the other Michelin recommended ones.”
Reetha is happy to share an easy Chicken Salad Recipe
Chicken Salad With Green Apple and Pomogranate
1. Boil 100gms boneless chicken without salt
2. Shred the chicken.
3. Chop 100gms Granny Smith apples
4. Mix shredded chicken, chopped apples and 100gms pomegranate seeds
5. In another bowl mix 2tbsp Mayoniase, 2tsp mustard, salt and white pepper
6. If the mixture is too thick, you may add little milk
7. Mix the dressing with apple, chicken, Pomegrante mixture
8. Serve chilled
Follow her Insta handle at tossed_and_dressed
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