Mesclun salad mix and radishes planted mid-March, harvested yesterday.
Dressings for salad must be a multi-multi million-dollar business and I’m suggesting that you make your own instead of buying the corporate variety.Or, use some of both.The advantages are that it’s economical, environmental, simple, and flavorful.And you’ll know exactly what’s in the bottle, no mystery ingredients.
Store-bought dressings sit side by side in refrigerators, usually several have been opened, and one or more are grabbed as needed. I admit that’s handy, but salad dressings can be made in moments, can be made in abundance, and will last for days in the pantry or fridge.
Truthfully, the fastest way to dress a salad is to work directly with the greens in the bowl, the Zen of salad dressing, almost nothing, but enough.Rub the salad bowl thoroughly with a peeled clove of garlic, add the greens, sprinkle with a little olive oil and toss to coat; add a splatter of lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper.Toss and taste. Go easy with the ingredients until you get the hang of it. Some people pull this off with such bravado and it’s instantaneous.
Balsamic Salad DressingI make this by the jarful in two or three minutes and store it in the cupboard for a week or more. This is enough for several salads, depending on size.
Smash 1 or 2 cloves of garlic and place in a glass jar. Add: ¼ cup Balsamic vinegar, ½ tsp. mustard, 1/2 - 2/3 cup olive oil.Lid on, shake it up and it’s done.If it doesn’t emulsify (thicken) add a little more oil.That’s it.You can play around with this, add or subtract whatever herbs or flavorings you like.Find the oil/vinegar balance (2:1, 3:1) to suit your taste and take it from there
Sweet & Sour Salad DressingPlace all ingredients in a glass jar: a finely minced clove of garlic and/or shallot, ½ - 1 tsp. finely minced or grated ginger, ¼ cup unflavored rice vinegar, 1 T soy, 1 T honey, ½ tsp. sesame oil, a pinch of red pepper flakes or cayenne, 1 ½ - 2 T peanut oil.Shake it up and pour over a cabbage or kohlrabi slaw.This one won’t emulsify so just give it a good shake before using.Add chopped scallion, sesame seeds, and a handful of cashews before serving to make it fancy, toss in shredded chicken for a meal. It could also be a marinade. Read the rest of this entry »
It feels like spring at the University Farmers Market. Energy is picking up, there are more vendors and more buyers. This was the last week for Preston Hill Bakery at our market. They make wonderful artisan breads using mostly local flour. I couldn’t resist buying some extra ciabatta knowing that they are moving on to other markets for the summer. I still had some bread ends from last week so I decided to use them in a savory bread pudding combined with fresh ingredients I picked up at the market this week. Bread pudding is one of those dishes you can make with good bread and practically anything fresh and it will be delicious. I found a recipe in the Tartine cookbook to use as my guide.
Our urban farms are ¼ acre tracts, sometimes less, but places where food is grown locally, where people and vegetables thrive.
Longfellow Creek Garden in West Seattle is one example, a quarter acre plot reclaimed for food production a decade ago, it fell into disuse and is now being revived. Along with a handful of committed partners and volunteers, Zach Zink is leading the way to making it a food-producing garden again. Last weekend thirty or forty volunteers showed up to begin cleanup, tilling began mid-afternoon, and there will be more of the same in coming weekends. If you’d like to participate check out their website which shows their link to Growing Washington and provides information about the Longfellow Creek Garden project.
On the same day, just a few blocks away, neighbors were preparing garden plots at Longfellow Creek P-Patch, a separate enterprise.
And, a couple of miles away, volunteers were laying the groundwork for another community garden, Psomizo Garden at West Seattle Christian Church.Psomizo is greek for “to nourish” or “to feed”, aptly named since their goal is to provide fresh produce to the local food bank.Aaron Hernandez who leads the grounds ministry there recognized the potential for a small garden space that otherwise was not productive.He’s leading the project to clean up, plant, maintain, and ultimately harvest produce from this small plot that he says “just looked tired, so I offered to use a portion of the grounds to an excellent cause.”Read the rest of this entry »
Accustomed to whatever food we crave whenever we want it regardless of the season, the cost of that to the planet has been disregarded or closeted until recently. A colossal carbon footprint is often required to put off-season food on our plates. It’s hard to face since we’re not prone to radical change on the supper table. Our stomach wants what it wants.
This New York Times article, Movable Feast Carries A Pollution Price Tag(4/26/08) with its accompanying video if you’re interested, is a good source of information about food carbon footprinting and provides useful perspective in making decisions about living green. Stepping lightly, living locally doesn’t have to be a crash diet, they usually fail, but a choice to do what you can reasonably accomplish a little bit at a time. If the crash diet approach is appealing, go for it. Some would argue that’s what is necessary.
Flowers, pollination, nectar, devotion to a queen, their utter busyness and single mindedness, the efficiency of their operation; a piece of warm toast slathered with melting butter and sweet honey. Sweet honey.We love most things about honeybees, especially the honey part. We write poems about them.They conveniently appear in our language when we need an idiomatic phrase like the bees knees, busy as a bee, a bee in your bonnet, sting like a bee, the birds and the bees . . .
On the other hand, we’re obsessed with their ability to sting, and our caring about their survival has been tempered with this edginess we may have about their presence among us. Perhaps we’ve been slow to acknowledge their duress. Growing food is impossible or impossibly complicated without bees, so understanding their stress, demonstrated in the widespread collapse of colonies, is important. This informative and short video will get you to thinking about it all and perhaps answer a question or two.
The Great Sunflower Project provides an opportunity to participate in gathering information about bees.You’re invited to help out.
Friday night is cocktail night at our house thanks to my husband Charlie, a master mixologist, and those of us who eagerly gather each week to taste. This week we decided to try our hand at a mostly local cocktail. We’ve been working on a drink using rhubarb and now I think we’re on to something special. Charlie likes to use lots of fresh ingredients and his drinks are incredibly healthy, or so we like to tell ourselves.
We have rhubarb in our garden but you can also buy it now at the Farmers Market. The first step in this cocktail is to make the rhubarb juice. I was inspired by Kate Zuckerman in her beautiful book, The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle. She uses the juice for a fruit soup, but since it’s Friday my mind is on a cocktail instead. Read the rest of this entry »
They grow up so fast and then we eat them, radishes and *mesclun. Seeds planted mid-March will be on the plate soon, and like a doting parent I’ve taken numerous photographs of their development along the way. I’m proud of what they’ve accomplished so far. Neighborhood bullies have threatened, but they’re robust now, and squirrels no longer dare to mess with them. Slugs, however, are drooling on the sidelines.
These baby greens will soon be salad. Known as ‘cut and come again’ they renew themselves repeatedly after cutting and produce many plates full of delicious green. They don’t dress themselves yet, but we’re working on it.
Adolescent radish, soon on the plate. Of course, I’ll send pictures of their graduation to salad.Read the rest of this entry »
When I think of foraging, I think of going out in the woods to gather something exotic like mushrooms. Gathering flowers is more like meandering through the garden, unless it starts hailing, snowing and raining. In that case, a rather fluffy pastime can turn into an extreme sport of running in and out of shelter with camera and tripod in tow. Lucky for me, I have easy access to loads of Viola volunteers close to my house.
The genus Viola includes violets, pansies, johnny-jump-ups and many more. I have 4 of the more common species in my yard and didn’t plant any of them from seed. I did “relocate” one from a parking lot years ago but the rest just showed up and continue to find perfect little spots here and there to take hold.
According to Robert Henderson in the Neighborhood Forager, all Violas are edible. He mentions eating the foliage, either raw or steamed. I have sprinkled the flowers in salads but I wanted to try to crystallize them for decorations on cupcakes. My assistants showed up and I immediately put them to work.
Air-dried sheets and pillowcases are one of the luxuries of life, but the convenience of electric clothes dryers overrides the organic alternative right outside the door. We manage to dry ours outdoors all year long with surprisingly rare interference from weather. Sheets infused with the fragrance of a fresh green bouquet are bedtime bliss so we’ve become determined about this. We strategize how/if line drying is feasible on a given day, and we’ve rigged up a line that can be stretched from here to there when we need it.
After years of line drying for these personal reasons, I recognized the environmental bonus: that it’s a small but tangible action toward living green and especially meaningful if it becomes collective action. If this one sounds enticing, find a way to make it happen, for your own sweetest dreams first, and then for the planet’s.
volunteers were laying the groundwork for another community garden, Psomizo Garden at West Seattle Christian Church.
Accustomed to whatever food we crave whenever we want it regardless of the season, the cost of that to the planet has been disregarded or closeted until recently. A colossal carbon footprint is often required to put off-season food on our plates. It’s hard to face since we’re not prone to radical change on the supper table. Our stomach wants what it wants.
Adolescent radish, soon on the plate. Of course, I’ll send pictures of their graduation to salad.
