Salad From the Garden, Not a Bag

Bagged salad was a wonderful invention.  Michael Polan writes of it’s creation in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  Thanks to bagged salad, no one need ever eat a tasteless, nutrionally void, iceberg lettuce salad ever again.

But salad, straight from the garden has ruined me on bagged and boxed salad for good.

Lettuce and other greens, warm from the garden, are a plate full of heaven.  My salads are complex dishes mixed with whatever I can find in the garden, including some highly nutritious and very delicious weeds, purslane http://www.wisebread.com/free-food-in-your-yard-edible-weeds and lamb’s quarters http://www.veggiegardeningtips.com/surprising-lambs-quarters/.  I pick small beet leaves and add them for color and flavor.  I throw in some edible flowers (nasturtium and viola).  All get rinsed and spun in my salad spinner and the kids do most of that work.  It’s everyone’s favorite job and I gladly delegate it.

I thin the onions and chop them into the mix.  I thin the beets, boil them, and dice them into the salad.

I make my own salad dressing!  It’s much tastier than anything I buy and I can pronounce all of ingredients.  My first attempt was a recipe I got from the South Beach Diet cookbook ages ago.  Then I bought salad dressing bottle with recipes on the bottle.  The recipes make more salad dressing than we can generally use, but it isn’t difficult to cut the recipes in half.  Last night we tried the Creamy Cesar and it was a huge hit with everyone.  As I said, the recipe makes more than we can use at one meal, so we are having Cesar Salad with homemade dressing again tonight.

Of course, everyone has his or her own favorite dressing recipe, so I am culling out all the bottles of dressing no one really likes, washing them, and using them for my own concoctions.

 The herbs and greens needed for fresh salad can be grown nearly anywhere.  Lettuce greens do great in shade during the hot summer months.  Greens and herbs can be grown in pots on a balcony.

My salad spinner and dressing jar have saved me much money and made me some truly delicious summer salads.  The dressing jar (Norpro 809 Salad Dressing Maker) doesn’t cost much more than a bottle of dressing, though any jar with a top and a recipe will do.  The spinner (OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner) was more expensive, but no more expensive than a few bags of salad greens and I use it to clean parsley and cilantro purchased out of season.  It's also easier to use than my father's spin handle spinner from Tupperware.  It doubles as kitchen entertainment for a very helpful five year old, which makes it worth its weight in gold.

Best of all, the response to last night’s Cesar salad from said five year old was this, “That’s the BEST salad and the BEST dressing I ever tasted.”

Who am I to argue with that?