Winter Salad

Fresh Greens from the Garden--In Vermont in Mid-January!

 

 

In the coldest of seasons, in the darkest of days, life goes on, and hope--and salad greens--spring eternal.

It's January thaw -- that annual occurrence of a few days of balmy thirty or even forty degree weather that feels downright tropical after last week's minus 20 Fahrenheit (yes, that is not a type -- it was minus 20 a few evenings last week). Yesterday, dinner was roasted root vegetables, including the last kohlrabi and the last turnip of the year. In a separate pan, I also roasted the last of the beets, to put on salads through the week.

When temps rose above freezing this delightfully sunny morning, I took a stroll out to examine the yard. It had actually rained last night, and the two-foot snowcover was gone. My kale bed was bursting with new green and burgundy leaves. I pulled the soggy straw off the parsley and chard, and they too were sending forth new growth. I picked handsful of tiny new green leaves to start my salad bowl.

At the other end of the salad greens bed from the chard, a few blackened heads of raddichio had soldiered through the snow cover, without so much as a straw blanket to comfort their frozen heads. I pulled the largest, stripped back the outer leaves, and was rewarded with a nice 4 inch head of bright red raddichio to add to the dinner loot.

On to the cold frames. The small one held some bedraggled arugula; the little bed is really too small to provide much protection from the cold. The larger 4'X8' bed, however, looked like a jungle. Spinach, arugula, mache, and sweet little 2" long French breakfast radishes with their cheery ombre of fushia and white.

Washed, spun-dry and chopped, I had about two quarts of salad greens. Plenty for two big dinner salads and lunch packed for tomorrow. I added some of the roasted beets from last night, some chopped walnuts, and grated some pecorino romano cheese that I had in the fridge since, it being that time of the year, I was also too broke to go spring for some nice blue cheese which would have been the absolutely perfect thing. But the pecorino romano added a surprisingly nice touch, so it's just as well that necessity was the mother of invention for this salad!

It's true that there are salad greens for sale in the market this time of year, but even aside from the carbon footprint question of where those salads came from, the price is nigh on unreachable for those of us feeling the economic pinch. This salad of organic greens with zero carbon footprint cost me the twenty minutes or so of picking, washing and preparing -- and gave me the great joy, deep satisfaction, and yeah, okay, bragging rights, of having picked my dinner from my front yard in Vermont in the depths of winter.