These are the days of the garden of good eating. Every night: fresh Asian greens, Hakurei turnips, and Easter egg radishes along with salads. I've concocted a new kind of salad mix lately, drawing basically on an array of available lettuce greens, herbs, and baby spinach, which actually isn't young at all but is the result of a plant that survived last winter's snow and this spring's mud as well as a transplant from one bed to the other. I wasn't sure whether the plant that had survived the winter could survive a transplant and by the time the plant proved itself worthy, it had begun to flower and bolt. So I've been clipping off the top and selecting a handful of small tender dark green leaves in hopes that the plant will experience yet another renewal and start to bush out into a full spinach plant once again.
In the meantime, the leaves pair well with the remnants of another soon-to-bolt lettuce green. This one is a kind of hybrid romaine plant that came from a set of seedlings that one of the Saratoga Farmers Market vendors gifted us with back in March. Like the spinach, the romaine survived the winter but faced an uncertain future when its leaves began to wilt in the container in which I was growing it around mid-April. I moved it into sun-warmed soil alongside a series of baby bok choy and tatsoi seedlings that seemed to be outgrowing their starter pots faster than I'd envisioned. Then, the spring warmth returned to a glum damp grey chill, and I thought I'd lost the whole lot. Hoping to salvage at least some of the plants, I clipped baby leaves off the bok choy and tatsoi in early May, then experienced the delight of watching the plants bounce to life. We ate from that garden nearly every other night for about a month, until the plants produced their final leaves and found relief in going to seed. By then, there was a healthy crop of arugula, basil, and mint growing in other beds, all of which combined with the struggling spinach and lettuce to produce salads that are a myriad shades of green and super-crisp.
As I've been scavenging and salvaging salad leaves from the gardens, I've also been trying to clear my refrigerator of various condiments that have found a home in the shelves over the past couple of years. Happily, the refrigerated shelf life for foods like miso paste, Worchestershire sauce, mustard, and Bragg's amino acids are fairly long. A little bit of label reading, common sense and creativity have led to some new salad dressings.
I never was very good at creating salad dressings from the basic balsamic vinegar and olive oil base. The vinegar always seemed too sharp and softening its edge with the smooth flavor of the oil seemed to blunt the fresh crispness of the salad greens I craved. My understandings of dressings improved, however, after I consulted with a coffee vendor at the Saratoga Farmers Market who encouraged me to go light on the oil and soften the balsamic vinegar's sharpness with honey, maple syrup, and a bit of fresh lemon. Another farmer was selling greenhouse-grown lemons at the time so I gave it a try and enjoyed it. Over the past few months, I've broken the dressing down into a formula that consists roughly of 1) an oil; 2) an acidic ingredient; and 3) some flavoring. With that formula in mind, I've created one dressing that blends miso paste, water, lemon juice, and sesame oil; another that mixes the olive oil with Worchestershire sauce; and a third that retains the basic olive oil and balsamic combo alongside the juices that spill out of freshly cut tomato slices and a few crushed leaves of dried stevia.
The challenge with these combinations is that they are un-measurable. This means that the quantities of each ingredient vary as do the combinations of items that get tossed into the salad spinner for a cold water cleansing and fast dry. I think, however, that the uncertainty works as long as the leaves stay small and green.
In the meantime, a new crop of lettuce has started to flourish, in the spaces where the first round of baby bok choi and tatsoi initially reigned.
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