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.

Cold Winds, Warm Food, Winter Wealth

The winter solstice has passed, but winter has just begun. It's time to start digging deep into the pantry, larder and cold frames for hot winter comfort food--starting with beets. If you were traumatized by slimy canned beets as a kid, it's time for some memory-re-adjustment. Beets are the source of much of the sugar you eat every day, which should tell you something about how sweet they are.

This year I grew six different beet varieties, some I'd grown before and some new to me. I'm forced to admit I was very impressed with the production and flavor of Kestral, and F1 hybrid -- I'm usually pretty adamant about growing open-pollination varieties but I make exceptions for F1 hybrids especially when I 'know' the seed breeder, like Vermont's own High Mowing Seeds.

But the biggest Wow in the beet patch this year was the Lutz Long Keeper, a OP Heirloom that grows quite bit. I picked a few of these through the fall for use as the other beets ran out, but I left about a dozen in the ground until the bitter end -- early December, just as the long, late warm autumn was about to crash into the single digits. I dug up the beets and the last of the turnips and rutebagas and put them in buckets in the garage with a bunch of dirt over them -- lacking a root cellar, a huge deficiency in my life.

I pulled the bucket into the kitchen today and washed and sorted the beets and turnips, putting all the golf-ball-sized ones in a bag in the bottom of the fridge for roasted mixed vegetables. The four largest beets I washed, trimmed, and put whole into a lidded casserole dish with some vegetable oil in the bottom. Set oven on 250 and left it for about four hours. Took the dish out and let it cool for a little while with the lid still on to keep the juices in there.

Then I toasted some chopped walnuts in a cast iron pan on the stove, peeled the beets and diced them, tossed them in a bowl with the walnuts and added crumbled blue cheese, the oil and beet juice from the roasting dish, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Scooped a pile of it out over some fresh-picked microgreens mixed with mache and radicchio and a couple little chard, beet, and sorrel leaves from the cold frames.... heavenly!

It dawned on me that this simple garden-dug and window-sill-raised lunch of mine would cost a princely sum in a restaurant -- which got me pondering the concept of wealth. If you have tons of money, you get the privilege of being able to purchase food that humble cottagers grow in their front yards... that's ironic. Yet our society doesn't value the food or the farmer/gardener as much as the dollars that buy it. I guess I opted to just skip the whole intervening money-making part and grow the food myself. Yet even many of my friends who remained in urban areas don't get that -- they say, why do I want to spend all that time growing a carrot and having to touch dirt when I can pay someone else to do it for me?

I suppose that if the hours you spend making the money to buy your food are intellectually, spiritually and socially rewarding, then by all means, it's a better use of your time than growing your own food. But if your work is tedious and dull, or infuriating and soul-draining...

Think about digging in the dirt. There's great wealth to be found there. Where else can you plant a seed, watch your seedling grow, harvest the fruit, then close your eyes and savor the rich, sweet rewards on a snowy winters day?