Salad days

A no-recipe recipe.

Right now you could be eating out of your backyard for most meals.

Say you’re in zone 5 or 6, at least, on the map we use in the US for gauging the climate needed to grow various things. Many of you are in that or warmer.

Say you sowed seeds for cool weather-loving spring vegetables like lettuce and radishes. Maybe you thought ahead and planted perennial chives and asparagus last fall or even the fall of several years past.

You might even have taken that farmer’s market celery stalk nub that you’ve nursed and harvested from all winter long—just sitting there on your kitchen counter—and transplanted it outside, into the garden.

My story about this renewable celery stalk has been one of our most popular posts to date on Notes, by the way.

If you’d sown an early-season vegetable patch, you could be eating out of it by now: Fresh radishes in a bowl with nothing more glamorous than a little olive oil and salt. The greens, too, deliciously edible, sautéd in bacon grease and serving as a side with a fried egg. Asparagus snapped off where they naturally break between your fingers, munched at dawn while standing out there, mentally planning your next weeding round.

For these are salad days, and the garden gives you food you can and should eat fresh, and freely.

I favor a variety of lettuce called ‘Bronze Arrow’ loose leaf. Often the more colorful a plant is, the higher its nutrient value, so that bronze blush provides additional anthocyanins that could reduce inflammation and protect you from chronic illness. But let us eat any color or type of this green. The loose leaf variety is a cut-and-come-again, so you can harvest it, and come back later for more as it continues to grow.

Our society has trended too much into the complex, the pedigreed, the call for an elite expertise on everything under the sun. We might feel as if we cannot prepare a dish without instructions, a recipe to follow, one carefully crafted by a graduate of a European culinary school.

But you don’t need a recipe to make salad. It’s the easiest—and maybe it was the very first—dish.

It didn’t even require fire.

A soft, leafy medium to start. Then you might add the roots of something colorful, like the radish called ‘Purple plum.’ Feel free to gaze admiringly at their audacious hue, lit up in the sun, before you slice them.

While you were pulling up radishes, you might’ve noticed that the perennial onions have big, juicy tops. So you cut some of these, knowing that you can, and the bulb will carry on just fine.

Add them to your salad.

Do the carrots need thinning? Like the radish leaves, carrot tops are edible, too. You might add them to your salad. If that’s too much for you, then cook them with your rice for something like rice Florentine.

Asparagus would also work well in your salad, fresh from the garden.

And what about chives? Maybe you like those better than the green onions, and it’s an added bit of loveliness to include the chive flowers, perfectly edible and a pretty addition to any salad, like a hair bow for Easter.

So you have the greens and a smattering of other vegetables, peppery and pungent, if you’ve opted for the radishes and chives or onions, and mild if you’ve added the carrot tops.

You might remember I said the radish leaves are edible. We cooked them in bacon at the beginning of this post. That was to soften the little prickly hairs and to melt some of the bitterness with a coating of fat, which the body also needs. You can stick these sautéd greens in the fridge or freezer to cool them down. Or, if you’d like their heat to wilt the raw veggies in your salad bowl, add them piping hot from the skillet.

Some of the things you need next might come from outside your backyard homestead, unless it’s large enough for you to raise animals.

We purchase meat and raw dairy from local farmers we’ve come to know over the years of talking with them at weekly farmer’s markets and visiting their farms. This is something you might consider. I’ve milked the goat—her name is Lena—whose milk I drink. I trust the farmers and their products.

For this salad we’re making together today, let’s use cottage bacon from a farm just a couple of hours away. Fry that in a pan. You could use the resulting grease from this to cook the radish greens.

A salad benefits from hitting a variety of flavor and texture notes: crunchy, peppery, salty, sweet. Sometimes creamy, if you need that. But we often don’t.

Raisins might balance against the spicy radish and tangy onions. Certainly the pumpkin seeds make the salad toothsome, and let me pause on those seeds for a moment.

I fermented green tomatoes last fall, and we ate all of the tomatoes in the jar I spiced with cumin. I soaked pumpkin seeds in the leftover brine and then dehydrated the seeds, which took on the tomato-cumin flavor. Now I add these to the salad. You might go to the trouble of giving your seeds a brine soak and crisping them in a dehydrator or oven yourself, as it is worth it. Plus seeds are said to be more easily digestible, more bioavailable once they’ve been prepared this way. I’m not a nutritionist, but I find the argument persuasive.

Lastly: I beg of you, do not douse this beautiful bowl of fresh food with a commercial salad dressing. Or at least don’t do this without first perusing the list of ingredients and noting the processing and making a conscious decision to adulterate your salad with high fructose corn syrup or seed oils or xantham gum. Yes, even the organic ones; sometimes especially the organic ones.

A salad needs nothing more than vinegar and oil. But let them be high quality: A good, organic (can we still trust this?) extra-virgin olive oil, first-cold pressed. An apple cider vinegar you’ve infused with herbs, perhaps even with a medicinal intent. For the salad we’ve just made here, I used olive oil and vinegar steeped with homegrown yarrow, mint, and echinacea for a few weeks.

So you see with the brined seeds and the infused vinegar, some preparation for pantry items to have on hand saves you time later when you just want to throw a little salad together.

The raw salad materials were the most meaningful preparation, though: Going out there in March, forking the soil, sowing the seeds. All for a bounty of salads in April, May, and into June, when salad days finally give way to summer’s peak.