Squid Salad with Fresh Vegetables — Warm Seafood Salad Recipe

I decided to make a squid salad and remembered that, when I talk with friends, more and more often they ask me for a few recipes for simple salads — not too high in calories, but tasty. I get it: diets and all the other complications. Then again, food that is too rich isn't good even for healthy people.

So, salads. It is commonly thought that a salad is a cold dish. Not always. There are loads of warm salads, and even hot ones. I remember we once tried a wonderful warm Provençal lentil salad. Or a superb seafood salad served on a heated platter: fried squid and octopus, shrimp and scallops with grilled vegetables and greens.

A salad is always dressed with either a sauce or oil. Vinegar, wine or citrus juice often go in too. It is almost always salted, unless it's a fruit or dessert salad. A salad is a starter that goes perfectly with a shot (or two) of something strong at the start of a meal. Though for me, as someone who drinks very little, a better starter is one or two small hot peppers stuffed with garlic and dill and lightly marinated in wine — a hot pepper appetizer.

Historically, the most popular salad here is Olivier salad, a very filling starter that is perfect for long feasts. Then again, Olivier can hardly be called a starter — it is closer to a main course. You can eat so much of it that you never make it to the meat.

Diet salads, though, not overloaded with fat and calories, are a topic of their own. As a rule, I always say that any salad of fresh vegetables, or anything like a Greek salad, fits dietary aspirations just fine. At one point we changed our way of eating radically, practically cutting out fatty meat, high-calorie ingredients and so on. And we didn't regret it.

These are leaf lettuces and head lettuces. Though here people don't really tell them apart. Without going into the finer points, the nearest supermarket, for example, has plenty: green leaf lettuce, romaine, iceberg, frisée, butterhead, oak leaf, cress, endive, arugula and so on. Leaf colors range from bright green to brownish purple, the taste from neutral to slightly bitter — take your pick.

Simple dishes are usually built on green salad leaves. Here “green salad” is a catch-all name for quite a large number of green plants that look somewhat alike. The simplest green salad starter is just lettuce mixed with vegetables and mayonnaise, which I don't like. But, as it turns out, if you use a little imagination and make a mussel salad, or better yet a squid salad — combining greens with warm seafood and dressing it with olive oil — the taste is amazing.