My Mother’s Salad

My mother has always loved salad. I was impressed early by her willingness to stand at the sink and prepare all the fresh vegetables she put into them. At dinner, it was a challenge to pick around the things I didn’t like (raw green peppers, onion) but I did appreciate the salad chock full of veggies. I have gone to salad bars that are much less stocked than my mother’s salads.

Even now, making salads for herself (my dad’s not big on vegetables, especially fresh ones), she will stand at the kitchen sink and peel and slice half a carrot, quarter a cucumber, take a few slices off a tomato or pull off a few small brocolli florets, to assemble her salad.

When eating out of the garden, many of the meals lack variety. The last two years that I’ve been eating seasonally and mostly from the garden, the biggest change to my diet has been paring down the number of ingredients in my dishes. How many things can you do with spinach? What do you do when the lettuce is done right when the toppings are ripening? How did anyone ever have salad with a tomato on top?

If it was in Minnesota, it must have been August or September. Not just any August, but one when the gardener planted the lettuce/spinach seeds at the right time so that the first baby leaves and thinnings are ready when everything else is also available. The carrots are out of the ground, the cucumbers are ripe, there are still a few tiny florets on the broccoli… There are beans and tomatoes and, if you got the planting right, even radishes again.

This is the best time in the garden. Although I mope around, unhappy with my yields and anxious about the squash ripening before the frost, cursing the green tomatoes that won’t ripen and their blighted vines, really it’s a glorious time.

I remind myself how well we’ve eaten and are still eating from the garden, even if my larder isn’t full and my freezer stands in the basement unplugged. I look back at the file I’ve kept with all the meals and see how the crops have unfolded.

It’s that incredible time of harvest and planting at the same time. Right now, we have everything AND the promise of more to come. There are neat rows of tiny plants coming up: beets, parsnips, turnips, lettuce, spinach, radishes; sprouts of winter carrots, spinach and beet greens in the cold frame box, and half the box still to be planted next month with winter greens. There are pumpkins and butternut squash ripening on the vine. There are potatoes still to dig and zucchini and cukes and peppers and cherry tomatoes, enough for every day.

And there’s everything you need to make one of my mother’s famous salads.