Something simple: Tomato salad with feta and fresh mint

Last night, I made a complicated dish that didn’t work and a simple one that did. This tomato salad took all of five minutes (and that included picking the mint from our garden) and was delicious. When am I gonna learn? Keep it simple, girl. Keep it simple.

There are only two important things to this salad: the quality of the ingredients and slicing the onions so thin that they collapse over the tomatoes and cheese. You want translucent shavings, nothing more. Attend to those two things and in five minutes you can have a salad so good that your family won’t notice that the main dish has the wrong kind meat in it and seasoning so off kilter that it is the flavor equivalent of eating a spasming pinball machine. Or maybe they will notice a little, but they won’t mind because they will be fighting for the last bits of tomato and who gets to mop up the olive oil, mint, and feta mixture left on the bottom of the plate.

Or so I tell myself.

The girls and I ventured out to the Schenectady Greenmarket this weekend and found these beautiful yellow tomatoes. I meant to grill them, but our grill went kaput a few days ago. My plan to let the grill rest a few days and then have it magically start working again didn’t quite pan out. So it was now midweek, and there sat the tomatoes threatening to go soft and spongy and give up the glow. There was feta in the fridge and mint in the garden. I could work with this.

My daughters and I sliced the tomatoes into thin disks, maybe a quarter inch, and arranged them on wide dish. It’s nice to have them as flat as possible so each tomato gets its fair share of topping. We drizzled our best olive oil over the tomatoes then dusted them with oregano. (I used dry oregano because the oregano in my garden has gone the way of my grill.) No need to drown anything, but it’s a good moment to be generous with the olive oil. Then we crumbled feta on top, small bits rather than chunks. The onions followed, a thin layer over the whole plate. Then finely chopped mint and maybe a wee bit more olive oil on top of the onions.

That’s it. Five minutes. And it almost made up for all my other mistakes.