Salad Story

No, I’ve never been a big salad eater. It’s nice and all, but always seems to contain way too many, you know, vegetables. Blech! Who wants those? Plus, I didn’t even know that other non-iceberg types of greens existed until after I got married. In case you were wondering, I think of iceburg lettuce in much the same way I think of celery: fibrous water. Thank you but if I want crunchy flavorlessness, I’ll chew ice cubes.

I haven’t turned into some wacky salad-lover (because salad-amor can only be bad), but my culinary greens are slowly becoming much more interesting. To me. Ahem, shortly after I got married, I discovered that all lettuce doesn’t have to be pale and sickly-looking and that Romaine is actually much more edible. Fast forward a few pregnancies and tomatoes started looking pretty good as well.

A couple of months ago I got a new cookbook The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio’s Award-Winning Food Show. One of the recipes called for escarole. Escawha? Apparently it was some sort of spicy green that was too swanky for Safeway to carry. Ditto the curly endive in another recipe.

Finally yesterday I got around to going to the Market of Choice down the hill from my house, where they carry all sorts of fancy thises and thatses and slap the “organic” label everywhere you look so they can charge gazillions of dollars for it. There, right next to the $49.99/lb. mushrooms (not even kidding), were my fancy escarole and endive and the more pedestrian romaine. They weren’t even terribly expensive.

I did get suckered into paying $4.99 for a small package that contained about twenty blooms from edible flowers. Some smarty pants decided not to put the names of the flowers on the package (otherwise, who would buy them when they can go raid their friends’ or neighbors’ gardens??), so I had to purchase a pack to take home and try to ID the contents. Of course, this becomes more difficult once the contents are in your stomach.

I had read somewhere or other (I think in that same book, which is full of all sorts of useful side information) that if you wash and spin dry your lettuce when you first buy it and then store it with a couple paper towels in a Ziplock bag that you’ve sucked all the air out of, it will keep in the fridge for up to ten days. Not wanting my new spiffy non-iceberg lettuce to get all gross, I spun it up in my
awesome new Oxo Good Grips Salad Spinner

that’s actually kind of fun to mess with. It’s very zoomy and spinny. You know, “awesome” and “salad spinner” are probably words/phrases that should never be uttered together.

I tasted some of the endive and escarole on the way home, and they both seemed more bitter than would be strictly desirous in a salad, so I stuck a whole bunch of romaine in the bowl and then a little bit of each of the others. Feeling all
epicurean, I then added maple bacon pieces (the real stuff, not disgusting fake bacon bits), tomato, hard boiled egg slices, and toasted pine nuts as well as a bunch of the flowers. A bit of fresh viniagrette for the table and voila! a lovely salad to go with George’s fabulous steak, my crusty bread, Bourbon and Brown Sugar beans (thank you, Bush company), and watermelon. And no, we did not devour all this ourselves. My parents came over and happily helped.

And the salad….. was a hit! Some of the flowers were a bit bitter, but the pansies were quite sweet and yummy. I’m starting to think about maybe making a potted garden next year and I’m going to have to look into some edible flowers for it. The endive and escarole added just a bit of a peppery flavor to the salad without overpowering it and making it gross. The entire bowl got eaten. I was shocked!

So that is my salad story (and I’m stickin’ to it!). Which officially makes me quite possibly the most boring person on earth. To make up for the fact that I’ve just essentially done an entire post on lettuce, I am leaving you with a picture that my FIL took on Saturday at our church’s picnic. This is Faith practicing her supermodel pose, complete with the cadre of admiring onlooking boys behind her. Hehe.

Rachel