Adam Stark 

Editor’s note.  I love lettuce, and romaine is my favorite.  Unlike Adam, I could happily eat a salad of romaine lettuce almost everyday, if someone else would wash it for me!  Seeing the gorgeous heads of lettuce arrive from Hutchins Farm is a thrill.  Each head is like a work of art.  I save cabbage salads for winter when snow flies.  Just goes to show, different strokes for different folks.  But when tomatoes and pickling cucumbers are ripe and ready, well that’s another story, and my summer salads take on a lot more color too!  Debra

I was in Israel and Turkey recently, and I ate a lot of salad.  I wasn’t trying to – just every time I sat down to a meal, there it was.  So I ate it.  And I enjoyed it.

And it got me to thinking: we do salads wrong in this country.  Forgive my lack of patriotism, but when I think of the American salad, I think of  lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce, dotted with the occasional “other” vegetable.  The only thing that changes night-to-night is the dressing – hopefully enough of it so you don’t actually have to see the lettuce.

(We’d never tolerate that monotony from our entrees: “What are we having for dinner every night for the next eight weeks, mom?”  “Chicken?”  So why do we tolerate the same salad every night?) 

Since when have we been so hung-up on lettuce, anyways?  It’s really not that special.  And it’s so delicate!  It doesn’t keep.  So eating it off-season is ecologically rough – all that fuel and refrigeration to get it to you fresh.  And a salad based on lettuce isn’t very filling, either.  A bowl of lettuce is mostly a bowl of air.  Tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, and cucumbers, on the other hand, are solid.

The trick with solid vegetables is to get them into a fork-able state.  So you’re going to want a vegetable peeler.  Not to take the peel off – lots of nutrients in that peel – but because a peeler turns carrots, radishes, etc., into perfectly toothsome, fork-able ribbons.  A decent-sized carrot is reduced to ribbons in 20-30 seconds.  

You really don’t need a recipe.  Nevertheless, here are three.

Purple and Orange (the color, not the fruit) Salad

• Roughly equal weights carrots and purple cabbage
• Extra virgin olive oil 
• Lemon juice, or lemon wedges
• Coarsely ground black pepper
• Sunflower seeds (optional)

Use the peeler to shred the carrots, and then use a knife to do the same to the cabbage.  Toss with some olive oil, sunflower seeds (optional) and black pepper to taste.  You can either toss it with lemon juice, too, or serve each plate with a lemon wedge at the table.

 

Red*, White, and Green Salad

• Plenty of lovely ripe tomatoes *(may be any color!)
• Feta, ricotta salata, or any crumbly white salty cheese
• Capers in brine
• Extra virgin olive oil

Chunk the tomatoes.  Crumble on some cheese.  Fork some capers out of the bottle.  Don’t rinse them – you want that bit of vinegar.  Toss it all with olive oil.

 

Classic Chopped Salad

• Roughly equal parts tomatoes and cucumbers.  (You’re going to want plain ol’ pickling cukes, not the big “impressive” English ones.  Cheaper and tastier).
• Chopped red onion to taste.
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Seasoning (I love oregano, but you can use other herbs; or Za’atar* seasoning mix, with hyssop, sumac, and sesame seeds).
• Optional add-ins include: black or green olives, chopped bell pepper, fresh mozzarella, fresh herbs, summer squash, scallions, leftovers…

Chop ‘em up chunky, or mince ‘em down fine.  It’s up to you.  Dress with olive oil and lemon juice (or serve lemon wedges at the table) 

 

*This is Debra again.  One of our newsletter readers, Debbie Bier, noted that I said American sumac is poisonous.  Not all varieties, she wrote. “Some common members of the sumac family found in our area are, indeed, edible and are used for both food and medicine…. the red berries found in late summer and fall are used in food. I first learned about this from Euell Gibbons' books. I doubt Euell knew about Za’atar, but the tart quality is right in line with the sumac used in the Middle East….Here is info about US sumac's uses from the Champaign-Urbana Herb Society (http://www.prairienet.org/herbsociety/hotm/sumac.htm)”