It’s August and my fridge is looking like the prep station at one of those create-your-own salad places, the kind where you move along the counter pointing to this and that while a server spoons, scoops, and tongs your bowl together. I seem to be specializing in assembling dinner, rather than cooking it. It’s all I can muster in the heat.
Here it is high summer, peak season for local produce and the moment every cook waits for — farm stands and farmers’ markets looking abundant and beautiful, and those freshly picked vegetables all tasting better than we remember. We greet friends sounding like farmers ourselves. Corn’s great this year, I hear myself saying to someone who didn’t ask my opinion.
By not cooking, I really mean that I’m not making much of what passes for meals in other seasons, or, in some cases, not even complete dishes. Certainly nothing that simmers longer than 15 minutes. I’m blanching vegetables, boiling potatoes, roasting chicken pieces. I’m assembling what are called “composed salads,” in which a few simple but perfect ingredients are arranged on a plate.
An old-fashioned Cobb salad is one example. But you don’t want to get too formal about Cobb and other composed salads. They’re much more appealing when ingredients aren’t displayed in rows and the whole thing is a bit more relaxed, a little messier.
At the market, I buy everything in sight, get it home, and then make a couple of the salad components each day. This is a little like batch cooking. You’re making enough to use for a couple of meals. Rather than crank up the oven, I use just the broiler, grill, toaster oven, or stovetop.
Here’s what’s in my fridge, on rotation, so there might be three or four of these: lightly blanched green beans sprinkled sparingly with olive oil and salt; sliced cucumbers and tomatoes with chopped basil and vinaigrette (or these may be separate so the cukes can sit by themselves in rice vinegar to pickle a little); sliced red onions in white wine vinegar; blanched corn kernels (slice them off the cobs the same day you buy them for the best crunch); hard-cooked eggs; salt potatoes, which I discovered recently and can’t stop making (very small potatoes boiled in heavily salted water, which, surprisingly, doesn’t make them salty).
There may be cooked rice noodles or angel hair; rice, farro, or bulgur; roast chicken breasts; pork loin; broiled salmon; dressings such as Dijon vinaigrette, rice vinegar-ginger, and ranch; many commercial pickles and olives; kimchi; and finely shredded fresh cabbage tossed with oil and vinegar.
Cooked beets might be on hand, especially now that a friend suggested making them in the pressure cooker (10 to 15 minutes, depending on their size); hummus, which I make with canned chickpeas; and some sort of smoky eggplant spread.
The recent cyclospora outbreak makes me nervous about supermarket lettuces, though, so the greens I do buy come only from local farms. In either case, wash the leaves in a vinegar-water solution, using 2 cups cold water to 1 cup distilled white vinegar, according to the USDA. Swish well, rinse well, spin dry.
A favorite heatwave salad is Vietnamese bun, a delicious rice-noodle dish topped with carrots, sliced cucumbers, crushed peanuts, grilled pork (I add chicken or shrimp), pickled daikon (which I typically don’t have), and a dressing whisked with fish sauce.
Pickled red onions and slabs of feta star in Greek salad with blistered cherry tomatoes and charred shishito peppers.
I’ve made Salade Nicoise dozens of ways, including with grilled salmon or chicken instead of the traditional tuna, which go nicely with the green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, olives, and capers also on the plate.
You can use tuna with the classic ingredients and layer them on a hollowed-out baguette in a sandwich called Pan Bagnat.
I found a wonderful salad in a book I really like, “Madaq: Simple and Delicious Everyday Recipes with the Flavors of Morocco” by Nargisse Benkabbou, who lives in London and Marrakech. When she was a girl, her mother took her to Fez’s Old Town and bought Tayb O’Hari, spicy chickpeas sold as snacks.
To infuse canned chickpeas with spices, she sautes them in olive oil with cumin, paprika, and, if you like, a little cayenne (definitely add it). Benkabbou now mixes those into a salad with tuna, hard-cooked eggs, red onion, and olives with stunning results.
Benkabbou’s chickpea dish can mostly be made with pantry items and ingredients such as eggs and olives that you may have on hand.
The best composed salads come from your imagination. That’s how Cobb was invented in the 1930s, when a chef opened his walk-in refrigerator and improvised. See what you have and patch it together. You really can’t fail.
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com.