TOKEN SALAD

I like a salad every now and again. With a zippy dressing and some tasty additions, like feta or croutons nestling between the inevitable spinach and rocket leaves, a good salad always sits alright with me.

What I don't like, is salad that goes everywhere.

I had one today, with a brie and cranberry panini. I was contemplating how posh a thing that would have sounded twenty years ago, and how nowadays, paninis are everywhere, and no-one bats an eyelid. And apparently, everywhere there's a panini these days, there's also a token salad to go with it.

Straggly bits of green stuff, anemic lettuce, two red chunks that were once half a medium-sized tomato, and bright cubes of cucumber if you're lucky. It's all there to make the panini look good - like anything in fact, other than a posh cheese and jam sandwich on a plate, which of course, is exactly what it is. The token salad isn't fooling anyone. Not really.

Now, I can cope with the thinness of it. I can even tolerate the crispy ends of dark-green and light-green leaves, and the frondy stems of curly kale that look like they've been disguising themselves as tiny bits of seaweed; I can stomach all of that without too much trouble.

What I don't get, what flummoxes me like a zebra with a barcode, is how in the world... you're supposed to eat it... when it's clearly intent on flying off in all directions!

No-one's denying the star quality of the panini in this drama of a plate arrangement! Clearly, a plate of only salad as a lunch, would require a bit more panache, a bit more class from the green stuff, but alongside these two flattened ironing-boards of seed-bread and their toasty filling, what you get as a sidekick to the panini, is very much the understudy. It almost expects to be left behind.

So.

You dig in. You slice into the panini with the knife, and the cranberry and the brie ooze against the fork.

Then you realise that the bread is stiffer than expected and so you press hard with aching fingers and you start sawing through it. You might even rotate the plate to get a better angle with the pivoting cutlery. Before long you're hacking into it like a handyman tackling wood in a vice.

And then, as if in a leafy protest at the noise, the salad starts flinging itself across the table! Bits of lettuce, stems (of whatever held the leaves together), one of the chunks of tomato, all bounce off the plate into a colourful circle of sheepish onlookers around the rim.

I try gathering up what's left on the plate usually, to spare it from the same fate. But sooner or later, I'm going to realise that I'd get on better opening up the panini and eating it one half at a time, instead of continually scraping the fork across the plate and setting my teeth on edge. I'm on edge enough.

And so at that point, as the bread flops open, the remaining bits of grass fling off and join the audience on the table.

So whose idea was this; to garnish our fancy sandwiches with leftover bits of the garden that are so upset they're trying to escape back to it? Proper salad, with a dressing, in a side bowl and we are away. I'd pay extra for that I think. Or, how about, inside the panini? Slipped in just after toasting perhaps? It wouldn't look great, but it would be more useful than it decorating the table.

To be honest though, I could probably make my own cheese and jam sandwiches, couldn't I?