You can make friends with salad

For the last six months I've been obsessed with a single dish from the same food outlet. I eat it for lunch at least once a week, sometimes twice… and once I'm pretty sure I had it three times within a seven-day period. Oops.

The outlet is a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese place near my office. It's called Misschu and it's run by a lady who I call Miss Chu… but only in the privacy of my head because our 'relationship' is at a point where it would be insulting to now ask her first name, even though mine is seared into her brain thanks to the regularity of my visits.

The dish is lemongrass beef vermicelli salad. I've tried other dishes from the menu: I've cheated on lemongrass beef with satay chicken for example, and while it's good, to me it's not as good. (I also have a regular dalliance with the Asian vegetable dumplings on days when I need a snack and not a meal.)

Early on in my burgeoning relationship with the beef salad, a colleague who also fell under its spell ran into my office in a panic. "This salad is soooo good. I love it but is it healthy?

Given it was now a part of my staple diet, this was suddenly a pertinent question to ask. I'm smart enough to know that because something is a 'salad' doesn't mean it's healthy, low fat or low calorie. So I applied some Diet Another Day tests to gauge whether or not regular consumption was going to move me up a clothes size:

What are the ingredients? Beef (though it's also available with chilli prawns or chicken), a mix of herbs and mesclun, vermicelli noodles, shredded carrot and a dressing which at my guess had garlic, fish sauce, chilli, vinegar, sugar and possibly the tiniest bit of oil.

Are there any potentially 'dangerous' zones? Nope. The beef used is a lean fillet, there is no greasy film inside the bowl at the end and the beef-to-salad-to-noodle ratio was good. And though it's a hole-in-the-wall, it's not one where you fear a serve of food poisoning with your pho. I may be a sucker for the marketing, but Misschu is clean, fresh and healthy, something which sets her apart from other Asian takeaway.

Does it meet my criteria for a nutritional gold star? A serve of lean protein. Check. A decent serve of mixed vegies. Check. A reasonable serve of carbohydrates. Check. The portion size is generous without being supersized, and without fail keeps me full and satisfied until dinner.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner! This is all guess work of course. I'd never ask Miss Chu what was was actually in the salad (she's lovely but I dare not risk getting my fix by offending her) but my friend Google has been a help and she confirms that it looks OK.

The bad news is I have to break up with Miss Chu. In a couple of weeks I'll no longer be working round the corner from her Takeaway Window of Joy and my visits will cease to be as regular, like maybe only once a fortnight. In the meantime I've found this recipe so I can make it for myself and my MasterChef-like brother-in-law also does a mouthwatering rice paper roll with similar ingredients.

Turns out Lisa Simpson was right: you can make friends with salad.