Word Play Salad Ingredients Trivia Quiz

Answer: Lettuce

Lettuce belongs to the daisy family of plants. Usually found in a salad, it is sometimes also found in sandwiches, bread rolls - and soup. Very wilted, one would think. The Egyptians were the first to grow lettuce agriculturally for food, but also for the seeds which were used in various medical treatments.

This plant contains vitamins A and K, plus folate and iron. It isn't terribly tasty by itself, but with a bit of salad dressing and salt, it's like nutrition in make up. The ancient Romans believed lettuce increased sexual ability (oh blah, blah), but the ancient Greeks associated it with male impotence (tell that to a rabbit). Practitioners of folklore medicine claim it can help heal just about every medical problem under the sun, but none of these claims have been scientifically proven - yet.

The best thing about it is that a freshly picked and washed lettuce makes a lovely crunchy addition to any salad.

Answer: Tomato

Did you know tomatoes are classed as berries? And that tomatoes grown in the wild were once the size of peas? I didn't. This berry very tasty plant originated in central and south America, where the indigenous people there consumed it as a matter of course.

When the Spanish invaded the Aztec civilisation, they took the tomato back to Europe with them and its consumption spread from there. Tomatoes took a little while to be accepted in Europe at first though, because they are related to the belladonna plant, and many people considered them poisonous. Europeans initially grew them for ornamental value rather than consumption. Tomatoes can be consumed in soups and sauces, in fruit juice and in vegetable juice, and in just about everything else under the sun, but in a salad, with a dash of salt, they can't be beat. And the beautiful aroma of a fresh off-the-vine tomato is just lovely.

It SMELLS healthy.

Answer: Cucumber

Cucumbers are refreshingly tasty plants that grow on a vine. Because they're mostly all water, your waistline is quite safe from expansion as well. These salad vegetables need pollinators to bloom, so in areas where they are commercially grown, farmers place hundreds of beehives in the field to help with the job. Oh, this is funny: There is a variety of this plant grown called the burpless cucumber. What a shame my father didn't know that.

He couldn't digest cucumbers at all. There are altogether quite a few varieties of cucumber all up, and all are yummy.

It is believed they came originally from India and spread into Europe from there. At one stage during the middle ages, it was believed that no vegetable should be eaten raw, and that they were bad for children, so cucumbers fell out of favour for a while.

But what is a delicious refreshing cucumber if it isn't eaten raw, I ask you ladies and gentlemen! Cucumbers of the world, unite! An additional bonus to this vegetable is that a slice of raw cucumber placed over each eye for ten minutes is wonderfully refreshing, as are raw slices wiped over the face.

Answer: Coleslaw

To top off any salad, just add some delicious coleslaw, which, in its most basic form, is simply finely sliced raw cabbage to which mayonnaise has been added. Other finely sliced vegetables can be added to taste as well, and the finished product is really scrumptious.

This treat comes to us originally via an 18th century Dutch landlady, an inventive woman who made coleslaw from finely sliced raw cabbage, plus vinegar, butter and oil. German people also make their coleslaw with oil and vinegar and sometimes add apple as well; Italians make it with diced ham; in Russia they add cranberries to the basic recipe (Nyet, nyet!); and one variety in the United Kingdom has walnuts and dried fruit added to the base.

As for me, I'll eat raw cabbage any time - with a dash of salt - but you can keep your cooked cabbage.

The smell of it cooking is a little too much for my olfactory receptors to endure.

Answer: Carrot

Carrots are delicious, crunchy orange (usually) vegetables that bring color, taste and health to a salad. It is believed they came originally from Persia and spread out from there. Packed with Vitamins K and B6, China grows almost fifty per cent of the world's carrots today, but pooh-pooh to that. Plant them in your own back yard and harvest them whenever you need them. You won't regret it. Fresh carrots straight from your garden (washed of course) are to die for.

They're so beautifully crunchy and healthy. Cooked carrots on the other hand - no way. I actively dislike them cooked, especially in today's restaurants where they cover them in honey.

It's revolting. And they NEVER cook them properly when they do cook them.

Answer: Potato Salad

Potato salad - another delicious dish to add to any salad, or simply (if nobody is looking) eaten as it is, out of its container. This salad ingredient is made from potato that has been cooked so that it is still relatively firm - it makes it easier to dice up that way. To this is usually added chopped up hard boiled eggs, finely chopped celery, leek and mayonnaise (or sour cream).

Other ingredients are added according to individual taste, but that is the basic form of this dish. Oh yum, I could do with some right now, but alas, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips as they say. We have Germany to thank for potato salad, and thank them I do indeed. Potatoes originated from Peru some ten thousand years ago, and God bless the person who first dug one up. Today there are over 5,000 different varieties of spuds world wide. Astonishing, isn't it?

Answer: Onion

Onions are a delicious addition to any dish, and very finely sliced onions just make a salad perfect. Not big chunks, just delicate hints of flavour. Perfect. This vegetable has been cultivated by mankind for thousands of years. They are thought to have originated in Iran or India. Sadly though, the wild onion in its natural state is now extinct.

It's enough to make one shed a tear - here, wave a cut onion under your nose and you'll be weeping in no time. Such is the popularity and longevity of this plant that the early Egyptians looked on it as a symbol of eternal life.

The mummy of Rameses IV, when uncovered, was revealed to have had onions placed on his eyeballs as a tribute to this belief. What a creepy image that would have been - a corpse with two goggly onion eyeballs staring at you. Did you know that if you boil up onion skins, you can create your own orange or light brown dye? Mother nature is just amazing.

Answer: Celery

Another delicious salad ingredient is celery. This plant has been consumed by man as far back as goodness knows when. It has a beautiful refreshing flavour, a pleasingly onamatopoeic crunch when bitten into, it is very low in calories, and it also makes a great addition to soups and stews.

It can be juiced up with, say, apples or carrots, to make a refreshing health drink if you're really into the health scene, and its extracts have been used in folk medicine for a very long time. The wild form of this plant grows naturally in marshland, and Wikipedia describes its flavour as "coarse and earthy". That seems almost insulting.

Answer: Beetroot

Most households in Australia include beetroot in salads without a second thought, but people from overseas tend to look sideways at this notion. Grated up raw, with a smidgin of salt and vinegar added, beetroot is really tasty - or busy housewives can buy it already sliced up and juiced from supermarkets.

It adds colour and flavour to any salad, but beware of the juice dropping onto light coloured clothing. First grown domestically by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, it was often eaten with garlic flavoured food because it was believed it absorbed the smell of that tasty morsel.

Its juice was also used to give wine a lovely rich burgundy colour later on in history, or you can make beetroot wine directly from the plant itself if you're into home made wines.

Here's something interesting too: Preliminary research by scientists shows that consuming beetroot regularly can help reduce hypertension. I had a pizza once made by a hippie friend. She had made it with various toppings and these included grated beetroot.

It was delicious and served up at a pleasant get together. I've had my suspicions every since about the other ingredients though. We certainly laughed a lot that day.

Answer: Mushrooms

Some folk also add chopped up raw mushrooms to salads here, but this is a relatively new addition to the good old Aussie salad. I can take them or leave them, but usually the latter. They don't seem to have any particular taste really. When eaten raw, they contain less than one percent fat, and a healthy serve of this plant contains only twenty-two calories on average.

This salad ingredient also contains a healthy serve of vitamins, but if you're going to include mushrooms in your salad, don't go picking them out in the wild.

They can be poisonous. Supermarket purchased ones are better - or, better still, leave them out of your salad altogether.