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The notion of summer as “the salad days” has lost some of its weight. Thanks to clever people with greenhouses, I buy gorgeous, ruffled heads of locally grown lettuce at farmers markets even in January.
It's one of the things that gets me out of bed at a ridiculously early hour on a Saturday – the chance to get lettuce that doesn't have the flavor and texture of construction paper.
Salads are important in my house, even when the season may not scream “salad.” I have a vegetable-averse spouse who objects to a long list of things.
No broccoli, no cauliflower. No cabbage. No kale. No collards or turnip greens.
Luckily, he likes lettuce, so nightly salads are required year-round.
Still, summer does have the salad advantage. In winter, it takes creativity if you want a salad that is technically more than a bowl of lettuce. You have to pull out things like toasted nuts, crumbled goat cheese, croutons and thawed frozen peas.
Come summer, it's so much easier. There are tomatoes, radishes and cucumbers. There are leftover chilled sugar snap peas, fresh onions sliced and soaked in cold water to ease their bite, maybe some really tender raw zucchini. Edible flowers if you want to get really serious.
The thing that unites my winter and summer salads, though, is dressing. Sure, we keep that one rack on the refrigerator door full of bottled dressings like everyone else. Some nights I can't muster the time or energy to whisk something on the spot.
But a few years ago, I started getting serious about dressings. Not just vinaigrettes, either. I did a story on making salad dressing from scratch and it woke me up.
Thousand Island from scratch is so much more than “orange goop from a bottle.” It's loaded with texture and flavor. Bottled Green Goddess is bland. From scratch, it pops with parsley, garlic and onion.
Last summer, the new book “The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper” took my salad dressing in a new direction with a page of fast dressings.
You make a mix of 3/4 cup wine vinegar (I'm partial to sherry vinegar), 11/2 cups extra-virgin olive oil, 1/8 to 1/4 Asian fish sauce (trust me), and some salt and pepper. It will keep for several weeks in a dark cabinet.
Then you use it to make different dressings: 1/2 cup of the basic blend with a minced garlic clove, some chopped basil, oregano and chives and you get herb dressing. A 1/2 cup with crumbled blue cheese, minced onion and a little cream and you have creamy blue cheese.
A 1/2 cup with 3 tablespoons dark mustard, a minced garlic clove, a couple of tablespoons of honey and 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise for honey mustard.
Brilliant, handy and endlessly adaptable.
Dressings from scratch don't keep forever, maybe four or five days in the refrigerator. But for that week, you get something special. And you make summer really worthwhile.
