Kalamata salad

Life can be hard. It can just sort of wear you down until you feel trapped in an endless routine, demoralized and dissatisfied. I'm speaking about other people's lives, obviously, because I'm somehow on like my 4th vacation so far this year. And it's only May. It's been kind of a whirlwind of a year, and I'm still not entirely sure how/if I managed to afford it all. But here I am, sitting on a Mediterranean beach, playing guitar, and actively waiting for the other shoe to drop. Eventually this will all come to an end, reality will butt its stupid face into my business, and I'll end up cleaning chimneys or something to retroactively finance my life of raging excess and occasional Airbnb use. All I'll have left will be the memories, the recipes inspired by my travels, and probably cirrhosis of the liver. Good times.

Ingredients:

1 lb. Baby Spinach (the adult spinach leaf has a darker color and a rougher texture, making the infant Spinach the easier prey)
2 Tomatoes
1 smallish Red Onion
1.5 cups pitted Kalamata Olives
2 cloves Garlic
1/3 cup Lemon Juice
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1.5 tsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first thing you're going to have to do is come to terms with the fact that you're going to eat a salad. Sure, salad is essentially a pile of leaves and other detritus that was probably first eaten as some sort of prank, but it's also allegedly healthy. Eating it, instead of real food, can help you live a longer, healthier life. A long life...full of salad. Yay? Once you've come to terms with this grim reality, we can work on making our salad not suck. Peel your onion and then cut it into quarters. Then thinly sliced those quarters and disdainfully toss them into a bowl. Remove the white core from your tomatoes, then chop them (the tomatoes) in to chunks and add them in to your bowl of disdain. Make sure your Spinach is dry, then throw it in there too, along with your olives. You're pretty much done at this point. Say what you will about salad, but it's super easy to make.

Actual salad for humans

It's time to talk about dressing. Many people who want to eat more salad despite the fact that it's salad will try and disguise it with a ton of sugar and fat. While this is tasty, it kind of ruins the entire point of eating salad in the first place (health concerns and/or masochism), at which point you may as well just eat a burger or some ice cream, because it's got the same nutritional value and will taste much better. So we're going to get our deliciousness from less contradictory sources. Torture lemons until you've got your 1/3 cup of juice. Then combine it with your oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and a tsp of the juice your olives were sitting in. Then choppity chop your garlic into tiny bits and add it in to the party. If you let this dressing sit in the fridge for a day or two it'll get even better, but you can totally use it right away. Just mix the whole thing together, toss it on your salad as needed, and consume. Congratulations! You successfully outwitted nature, and ate something both healthy and tasty. Stupid nature.