Fast food at home, part II: Salad

My basil is running late. So’s my arugula and mesclun. Not their fault: I was late planting, thanks to an eternal winter and illness that kept me bedbound when I might have been sowing seeds. Then more cold weather kept my seeds from germinating until the sun finally broke through. Every gardener and grower knows that we are ultimately reliant on the good graces of the weather goddess. However, the recent spate of wet weather has meant no hauling of garden hoses. Small mercies, right?

Enough said. The garden is up, and greens are top of mind. What to do now that we have multiple lettuces, spinach, chard, herbs, mesclun, all the greens and purples that we miss all winter?

The answer is easy: salad, the primo short-notice dish. Tasty, nutritious, handsome and easy to spin, it’s the busy gardener’s favourite fast food. A bed of freshly cut greens, a favourite protein, some garnishes with gusto and a dressing you love. How fast is that?

I’ll leave picking the greens to you, now that our gardens are galloping. But here are a few considerations that will go a long way toward making salad more than another bowl of greens.

First up: protein. In summer, I am partial to cold suppers, so I like to have cooked chickpeas or house-made hummus on hand (made from leftover chickpeas cooked for channa masala, five-bean salad or mulligatawny).

Chickpeas keep me in the game by making my meal meatless and heart-smart, low on the glycemic index and in cholesterol, and high in protein and dietary fibre. And delicious. Then there’s the big plus side of cooking them in my Instant Pot: thirty minutes start to finish.

Alternatives include leftover or cooked-in-advance proteins: grilled flank steak, roasted chicken, pulled pork, leftover lamb, lentils, hard-boiled eggs, tuna with mayo and pickles, whitefish and salmon patties. Cook in the morning, before the world heats up.

Next: dressing. There are varying schools of thought on how to dress for dinner. The first is to buy a pre-made bottle. Or you could make a tuxedo with tails, by which I mean put together a snazzy salad dressing in advance and keep it in the fridge waiting for An Occasion. Third option: buy terrific vinegar and good oil to pull out without a second thought, like the proverbial Little Black Dress. Not that my life has many LBD Occasions, but you get the vibe. (I haven’t had a tux since I sold my Simon Chang tails back in my thirties.)

I’m a vinegar geek, with half a dozen types on my stove-side roundabout, for deglazing and salad dressing. There’s balsamic, enticingly sweet and tart, for which you can pay all kinds of crazy money, or not.

Then there’s Japanese rice vinegar, also sweet and tart.

My current fave vinegar is from the Spanish sherry-making house of Alvear, made from Pedro Ximinez (PX) grapes. Yes, also with a sweet-tart edge.

I’ve been hoarding my last bottle of South African Rozendal, just used up a tangy Northern Vigor seabuckthorn cider vinegar and found a pungent Saskatchewan-made malt vinegar from Nokomis Craft Ales. Plus, each year I fill glass jars with berries, plums, ginger and garlic, fresh herbs and whole spices, top them up with apple cider or white wine vinegar to infuse and then shelter them from the light in my cupboard to be brought out one by one.

So, stock up your pantry. A woman needs a few LBDs, just in case. In the meantime, here are two good dressings with variants to clothe your salad with style.

First, we eat, then a little retail therapy.

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Click here to read part one in this series.