Goopy, yogurt-covered fruit salads are decidedly unsexy, particularly after sitting on a picnic table for hours. But a fruit salad doesn’t need yogurt. In fact, if I had to choose one kind of dairy to pair with a bunch of juicy, sweet produce, I would pick cheese.

If you make a habit of reading the labels on bottles of a store-bought salad dressing — including the fancy ones — you are unlikely to find olive oil on most ingredient lists. This is partly a matter of cost, but it’s also a matter of taste.

I love many things about the salad bar at my local bougie grocery store, but I love their lemon-tahini dressing the most. It’s rich, nutty, slightly tangy and sweet, and makes any vegetable it touches — even the driest of broccoli slaw — infinitely more edible.

Salads, in my opinion, should be a fork-only operation. Once the salad is prepared—preferably in a large mixing bowl — one should be able to stab and shovel the greens and various toppings into one’s mouth, without use of a knife. Actually, I barely use a knife during the salad-making process—scissors are my salad prep utility of choice.

It is easy to get overenthusiastic at the salad bar. I tend to both overestimate my appetite and underestimate the filling nature of fibre, and thus usually end up with at least half a cup of salad that is fully dressed with nowhere to go.

Unless it’s made of sturdy stuff, next-day salad is a sad affair, but only if you try to eat it as a salad. Cook it into a scramble, however, and you get to start your day on a very virtuous note.

Any good vinaigrette contains oil and water-based ingredients which, if we remember our basic chemistry, are not particularly fond of each other. To help these diametrically opposed partners get along and work as one, you need an emulsifier.

There's a certain beauty to the inside of a red cabbage or a head of romanesco, but as a group, root vegetables aren't much to look at. Celery root - celeriac if you're posh - is far and away the ugliest of the bunch, and it's also my favourite root vegetable of all time. What delights lie beneath its filthy, gnarled hide? Let's find out!

Eating is complicated. Not only is food comprised of complex chemical systems that affect our bodies in all sorts of ways (both good and bad), but once you start thinking about animal welfare, farming practices, and water use, it can be downright overwhelming to try to eat “like a good person.”

But that doesn’t mean our good friend Brian Kahn (of Earther) isn’t going to try his hardest.

It is a well-established fact that starting your day with a salad makes you morally superior to everyone around you in every way, but weekday mornings are simply not the time for rinsing, chopping, and dressing a pile of vegetables. Enter the breakfast slaw — the make-ahead option for breakfast salad lovers that can be batched on a lazy Sunday, then enjoyed throughout the week.

As the year draws to a close and January 1 begins to loom in a slightly ominous fashion, you may find yourself examining the food choices you made in 2018. Obviously you should regret nothing, but if all this reflection leads to hankering for a salad or two, we have quite a few resources to make sure it’s the best salad possible (including a bacon fat vinaigrette).

During this season of candy and comfort food, eating a vegetable almost feels like a treat, particularly if it’s a raw vegetable. But unless it’s well dressed, consuming a pile of plant parts (also known as a “salad”) can be a lacklustre affair, which is why I’m thrilled to tell you the good news about this whole-kumquat dressing — a sunny, refreshing salad pal to help reset your palate and soothe your internal organs (allowing you to get back to cookie eating).

Summertime is, to me, synonymous with spicy peanut noodles, which I've been making every summer since I was allowed to cook pasta by myself. I love them so much that they almost make suffering through vicious, swampy heat and humidity feel worthwhile. Almost.

The word "salad" does not denote "healthiness" or a lack of kilojoules (in fact, they can be worse for you than burgers). Nevertheless, something about the word implies a scarcity. Packing a salad for lunch seems to doom one to an afternoon of hunger pains or emergency vending machine runs, but no more. We're going to tell you how to build a salad that will leave you full, satisfied, and happy.

There is something extremely satisfying about a rice paper roll. Though I love a good egg roll, spring roll, or any other fried package of rolled-up food, the lighter, cooler, more chewy rice paper roll is the one I crave more often than not, particularly during these sweatier months.

Spending your money on ripe sour cherries is a serious commitment. For me, the promise of cherry pie doesn't outweigh the pressure to pit and/or freeze kilos of very expensive fruit before it turns to soup, which happens seemingly overnight - but apparently, the promise of a marinated beetroot salad sure does.

The classic tomato-based caprese salad is without flaw, but creamy cheese, vibrant basil, and a drizzle of oil and vinegar get along swimmingly with many other fruits, particularly fruits of the stone variety.

A true Caesar salad dressing gets its rich, salty funk from anchovies, but not everyone eats fish. Shouty purists may insist that those people simply don’t deserve a Caesar salad, but I think that’s a little harsh, especially when you can make a very good vegetarian approximation with blue cheese.

Blue cheese dressing is bigger than salad. Sure, it’s an integral part of a wedge salad, but it’s also the only wing dipper that matters, and it makes a sad veggie platter bearable. Store-bought is fine, but you can make truly bomb blue cheese dressing yourself with just three ingredients.

During any weekend dinner party or barbecue night you can almost guarantee it: Somebody is going to bring a bowl of terrible coleslaw to your home, and you're going to have to pretend you like it.