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IN SEARCH OF SALADS NOW!
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IN SEARCH OF SALADS NOW!

Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! - A variety food column, Feb 07- Feb 13, 2026, Life & Living February 6, 2026 , by

LATELY, I’ve been putting my foot down on less fryums and more salads at my only two person home and in vain! Even if I finely cut an onion and put it on the table no one eats it, not even me, so I have to chop it up fine and re-cycle the onion in an omlet! It’s no point saying I want to eat salads while the other partner wants to eat fryum crunchies…it’s a strict no no to sprouts, although I find a combining moong sprouts with ambe mor or Indrani rice make for a good Sunday kichadi for lunch, can be both superlicious, nutrilicious (coining new words here okay).
Althoough I keep thinking of making something at home and buying something from out, mostly weekends when I don’t feel like washing up, I find only a few trusted eateries down town Panjim. With the spiraling prices I don’t want to buy from out either nowadays, wasting time and money stuffing something agreeable in the mouth…however, I keep looking for a good salad on a menu for a good take away, salads always interest me and they’re easy to do at home and not easy to do at home if you understand what I mean.
Anyways and usually in vain I’m forever looking for interesting salads, chutneys, dressings…(sigh)…none of Panjim’s bakery or confectionary outlets, or even cafeterias stock really interesting salads which one may make a meal of. Only on 5-star hotel menus one may find a sumptuous range of salads from Greek to Waldorf to other fancy salads – if a Caesar’s salad features only iceberg lettuce or one of the common green lettuce lettuces I’m not interested! But lots of arugula which has a piquant peppery flavor lights up my eyes…buffet salad counters offer so many options that one may of course make a virtuous mini-meal here alone if one so wishes. What with the Lebanese or Middle Eastern hummus-tabboleh-baba ghanoush-muhammara – etc, to tuck in with pita bread quarters, the cheeses, olives…at the chaat section I find even the 5-stars don’t add dahivada anymore, if there’s a decent dahivada in the chaat corner I’m very happy because one may do one’s own flavoring with the chutneys of tamarind, date, mint-coriander. I wish there was a special offer just for a salad meal deal!
THEN out of the blue last week I stepped into Vincent Dias’ welcoming cool Cremeux cafeteria at Miramar and amongst the pizzas and burgers saw they have introduced a Corn & Crunchy Veg Salad (Rs175) which comes with a long thin slice of baguette garlic toast. Pack up for me, I said, and brought it home only to discover the salad was a bunch of diced salad veggies and what do you know, there was a curry leaf, green chili and mustard seed tadka atop it! I was zapped. I mean who would want to do a tadka (tempering) in a salad?
Wow, I told myself, no dressing of any kind but a desi tadka…for a while I didn’t know what to think, but the rest was fine – the salad included tidbits of exotica like baby corn, broccoli, purple cabbage and some more. I just pulverized the salad into a soup! Good Lord, there were bits of fiery chopped green chili in it…it freaked me out, I kept looking for them to hunt them out. I don’t like green or red chili hot salads.
Hey, if you’re putting fresh chili in anything at least slice it whole, remove seeds…one may easily remove it, chopped in is an impossible job removing the chili bits. Well, for something Rs175 it turned out to be a fairly okay salad but minus the tadka. I went and got again without the tadka. Honestly, one can’t find decent salads for love or for money in any of Goa’s fancy or not so fancy cafeterias! Nor agreeable soups like minestrone…even freshly made fine sandwiches stuffed with thin slices of cucumber, tomato, cheddar, lettuce, salt- peppered, are hard to come by.
AT HOME these days I find I’ve fallen slightly for the Marc Brown (baking since 2011) whole wheat bread (atta) and yes, whole wheat bread with millets…no added sugar, zero maida, no palm oil. Rs50 sliced loaf. Reportedly, “handcrafted in small batches” but at this point of time it’s best bread in town and they have an outlet at Caranzalen close by where I stay, so it’s quick to get. Check out Marc Brown loaf breads, they come sliced mercifully. I keep telling them to do the millet unleavened flatbreads as in jowar or nachne chapatti or bhakri …but no wants to introduce these superior staff of life. Everybody prefers to eat soft white refined bundles of goeey bread and the parade of confectionary … to end up with serious health issues later on. Never mind how many times one repeats that refined sugar is carcinogenic. We really want to end up as cancer basket cases later on in life…well, honey, your life.


 To wind up on a lovely note, I found this quaint quaint “matulinga” lemon at the recent Ayurveda summit in town and was totally smitten. This is a rather incongruous looking jumbo lemon utterly fragrant with citrusy notes…it’s a bitter lemon, Chef Rajat Bakre here at the All India Institute of Ayurveda Goa section enlightened me, “It grows in wild in the Western Ghats…in the market it is quite expensive at Rs250 a piece! What I did was cut the matulinga into pieces, toss it in Kashmiri chili, salt, haldi (turmeric), marinated it till 8 to 10 days old but 3 days is fine; one may also do a tempering in sesame seed oil, put in rai (mustard seeds) and hing (asafetida), in Ayurveda we prepare these pickles only using physically cold pressed sesame seed oil.”
Did some homework: The matulinga or matalinga lemon — is a citron variety called botanically Citrus medica, locally also Bijora-nimbu, with its thick, rough rind…it’s considered a very sacred lemon. Don’t knock this, the Goddess Mahalakshmi is depicted holding this matalinga lemon in her lower right hand at the Mahalakshmi Temple in Kolhapur. Also, local lore says it’s all kinds of good things, vitamin C-enriched, full of antioxidants, etc, magically properties. I take all this with a pinch of salt but am open to persuasion otherwise.
Well, that’s that, my dears, go look for this matulinga lemon if you can! It’s a fascinating find.

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