A Super Salad

"Too many simple green salads suffer from lack of imagination." - James Beard

Here we are at November 7th and the highs are in the mid-80's.  Looking at the bright side, the garden is flourishing.  For the supper menu tonight, we had some homemade pesto and bowtie pasta as the main course and figured that a FRESH garden salad would be the perfect accompaniment.  If you're not busy, would you come with me and gather the ingredients?

Let's stop off at the cattle panel that doubles as a trellis for the sugar snap peas.  They are healthy and climbing and are almost five feet tall right now.  Blooms are in abundance and there are already numerous pea pods.  We'll pick some of those as they are so sweet and delicious in a salad. 

Here's the lettuce patch.  There are five or six varieties going.  We've been eating a lot of salads lately.  Several years ago I learned something that I feel embarrassed to share, but here goes.  I would harvest lettuce by pulling each up by the roots.  This was dumb.  Super dumb.  Somehow I used my noggin and figured out that if you just snap off the leaves (not by the roots), your plant will continue producing and producing until next spring when it gets warm and bolts.  Then you let it flower and save the seeds.

But for now, we'll pull off the biggest, prettiest leaves from a variety of lettuces so that the salad bowl is multi-colored.  We hear a lot about "Farm to Table" and how fresh that is.  This salad will be picked, washed, tossed and eaten within 30 minutes of harvest.  Let's grab some lettuce and get going inside to put it all together.

The lettuce goes in a salad spinner where we'll wash it up real good and spin it dry.

Not all things in the salad are fresh.  Here are some lacto-fermented cucumbers that we pickled back in the spring.  I like to cube these up and throw in the salad bowl.

Even older than that is some lacto-fermented ginger carrots from February.  So cool, tangy, and tasty!  Let's put several fork-fuls on top.

This stuff here, although its not homemade is like the cherry on top.  This olive salad is the concoction that they put on a muffelleta.  It's delicious on a salad, too.  A spoonful or three on top...

All goes in a big wooden bowl.  We'll top with grated parmesan cheese, green onions, salt & pepper.

We'll add some ranch dressing and top it off with some lacto-fermented HOT banana peppers.

We'll ask a blessing over the salad and pasta and dig in.  Super salad!