Lemony Garlic Vinaigrette

First spring salad of tiny baby greens

This could be the world’s tiniest salad. It’s the perfect, tender little harvest from my first few greens that are finally sprouting enough leaves to begin eating them. Isn’t that first handful of fresh baby greens the most amazing taste experience? It’s like eating pure energy fresh from the ground; and each leaf has its own distinct taste and texture. Here in this little collection I have baby spinach, mizuna, an heirloom red lettuce, mesclun mix, fennel, chives, fresh tarragon, the tiniest arugula leaf, several leaves of sorrel and a few pea shoots. Eating it was pure delight.

Naturally, I had to quickly mix up a bit of dressing worthy of the occasion; even my very tasty storebought Balsamic vinaigrette wasn’t really right, and it would have overwhelmed these tiny greens anyway. I spied a few leftover lemons on the kitchen counter from when Tomas was sick last week, and the aha! moment struck. In a nutshell, here is what I did (and the base for it was a few tablespoons of leftover olive oil from our recent camping trip):

Lemony Garlic Dressing

Several tablespoons olive oil

juice of half a lemon

1/4 tsp stone ground mustard (I had a little jar of saffron mustard from Prague sitting in the fridge that has a very delicate flavor and was just the ticket)

1 clove garlic, minced

several grinds of pepper

1/4 – 1/2 tsp salt

a bit of chopped fresh herbs: in this case, I used some frozen dill I found in the freezer because it seemed like it would complement the lemon really well and, well, it was there. It was probably between 1/4 and 1/2 tsp.

Mix all ingredients together in a small bottle and shake vigorously. Taste and season as needed.

This dressing had a distinct lemony bite to it, but could be softened a bit by increasing the oil to lemon juice ratio. I thought it was just exactly right for the snappy, fresh greens that I’d picked 20 minutes ago, which had a little tart bite of their own. I used the dressing VERY sparingly, just enough to add a little bright zing to the greens, not to cloak their uniquely ‘green’ flavor.

This was my salad two days ago. Today I got to add a few leaves of baby bok choi and some small radish leaves. It’s hard to believe that pretty soon I won’t be able to keep up with the overabundance of lettuces, 4 kinds of spinach, and dark leafy greens taking over the raised beds! It’s so hard to be patient…

Read Full Post »

Garden Diary: April

From the garden yesterday: 3 eggs, 1 handful micro-greens (thinnings from my broccoli and kale starts – yum). Herbs: chives, sage and tarragon are all ready to use.

Last year's green onions in the garden.

All this hype about Victory Gardens, the White House garden, and recession gardens, as I’ve heard them called, is making me want to try out a little experiment this year: documenting all the food that I get out of my garden this year. I am not alone in doing this; many others are conducting some sort of observable food production science in their yards as well.

What I really ought to do is document the money I’ve spent on the garden as well. I’ll try to find my Home Depot receipts and my seed order total – that should actually not be too hard. I’ll report back on that. Meantime, I’m going to track what’s coming out in terms of edible produce. Hopefully, at the end of the season, this will result in a really fun way to see just how productive and economical this hobby is, or if it’s more, well, just a hobby. When it comes to eggs, I already know the answer – but I’m counting them anyway because they’re worth the effort! I haved 4 chickens right now, and this will help us decide if we want more, or if 4 is just right.

I am also using this blog as a way to keep a garden diary, since I do not have one in reality (well, I guess the internet is real, but I don’t have a physical one!). I want to know what I did when, how long it took for things to come up and mature, what was most successful, and so on.

So here’s what’s in the garden right now. I planted all of these right about at St. Patrick’s Day in March.

• Cherry Belle radishes: came up beautifully, all seedlings have since been nibbled off by a little visitor of some kind. I will have to replant this weekend.
• Helios radish: looking really good. Good-sized seedlings, done first thinning already.
• Cilantro: nothing happened for weeks, now I am finally seeing several seedlings that I have to hope are the damn cilantro finally making its appearance…
• Chives: see notes on Cilantro.
• 3 kinds of spinach: all making progress. One (Melody, planted in a container) is almost ready to start nibbling on; it has a good set of first real leaves and the next round is in the works.
• Mesclun mix: visible.
• Mache: nothing at all. This is a big disappointment. I may reseed and see what happens. It does say on the seed packet that it can take 20 days to germinate, and it even says “be patient,” so maybe I should just try that…
• Mizuna: looking really good. Too tiny to eat yet, but looks like what it is – beautiful teeny toothed leaves.
• Lettuces: Rouge d’hiver, Speckled, Merveille de Quatre Saisons – all have made an appearance and I’m waiting VERY impatiently for them to be harvestable.
• Peas: sugar snap, Alaska, and sweet peas – all came up finally in the last week and I’m looking forward to some pea shoots in my salads!
• Green onions: after a long wait, these too are up, which is a thrill because I thought I was not going to get results from last year’s batch of seeds.
• Carrots: Nantes Little Fingers and Cosmic Purple – the Cosmic came up first, also after a long and breathless wait, and now the little ones are finally making an appearance. I may have gotten lucky with a whole lot of snow at just the right time; carrots NEED to be moist in order to germinate and my luck so far with them has not been stellar, so this crop looks like it will be a good one and I’m thanking the weather gods for that.
• Bok Choy: looking good! Waiting to thin the seedlings till they’re at least the size of micro-greens so I can eat them.
• Swiss chard: very early seedling stage right now. Some of the ones in the first container I planted got smushed by the snow and didn’t come back. I have more seeds and will possibly do a second planting depending on how many of this first batch actually get rolling in the next couple of weeks.

Now for my indoor seed starting project:

I planted a tray of Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Brussel Sprouts, Lacinato Kale, and Leeks. All have sprouted nicely, I just thinned them yesterday, and I’m religiously putting them outside in the cold frame during the day and bringing them in at night, so – knock on wood – they look fairly normal and not too leggy or washed-out. The thinnings made for a delicious tiny salad yesterday!

That’s all for now, but I have plenty of work to do…. thinning the bok choi, cleaning out the coop, turning the compost, watering my ‘soil-building’ project which is going on in one of my raised beds (I should post separately about that as well). Happy April!

Read Full Post »

Tarragon Vinaigrette

Today is the first day of the rest of my life – my life without store-bought salad dressings, that is. Not that I haven’t ever made my own salad dressings before… but they were always a luxury, something you did for a special dish that called for it, or when you were really motivated, or found an irresistible recipe (like this one, which I will always go to for an extra-indulgent special occasion dressing – at least until I find something better, which may very well never happen).

But today, in the early hot days of summer, as I was trying to restore order to the jungle that I returned to after 10 days away from my newly planted vegetable garden, I saw herbs gone wild, overflowing their raised beds. I remembered last year, when I planted all these lovely culinary treasures and then let them go to seed – only to find myself needing fresh oregano or fresh thyme when I should have had it, and didn’t. This is not going to happen to me again, I thought; I am going to harvest and preserve this stuff if it kills me.

But it’s only May! Ok, June 1st. But the specter of being functionally herb-less in the middle of summer haunted me. The tarragon has been flourishing there in the back of the garden since March, and all I’ve done is pinched off a few leaves to garnish a salad – once. Am I going to let these $3 plants pay for themselves this year, or not?

So right now in my kitchen, there is an alarmingly large pile of oregano drying on 4 paper towels, waiting to be picked over and frozen. The tarragon plant was even scarier – two feet high and almost as thick, waving happily in the breeze. For some reason, that one screamed out “salad dressing.” Maybe because I once had a bottle of tarragon vinegar that I never did much with and still feel I tragically wasted. Maybe because my greens are growing faster than I can eat them, and the selection of bottled dressings in the fridge is getting really depressing, and wholly unworthy of the endless bounty of melt-in-your mouth fresh lettuce. So after harvesting two armfuls of 8-inch long tarragon clippings, I dove into the recipe books. Martha Stewart whetted my appetite with a lovely-sounding herb vinaigrette, but I didn’t have a shallot handy (though I regret that, because I often do and I think they’re an overlooked staple), nor sherry vinegar. Silly me. The Mediterannean Herb Cookbook suggested a dreamy-sounding creamy yogurt dressing, but alas, no yogurt (we usually have tons, but we just got back from Europe and the fridge is still empty… an odd sight).

Time to improvise. After a quick visit to Google to look at basic dressings and a reference back to Martha for quantity tips on the extras (sea salt, garlic), here is what I ended up throwing together, and BOY IS IT GOOD drizzled over a salad of just-picked spinach, mesclun mix, baby romaine lettuce, radishes, green onion, chopped walnuts and sunflower seeds. I’m full.

Tarragon Vinaigrette

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

3/4 cup olive oil (I went for the good stuff, a bottle from Hania, Crete – it is strong though – and expensive – so I would consider diluting half of it with standard EVOO next time)

1 large clove garlic, minced

generous grind of fresh black pepper

1 tsp sea salt

1 heaping Tbsp chopped fresh tarragon

1 tsp chopped fresh chives

Whisk together ingredients in a small bowl. Toss with fresh greens and enjoy!

Does it get any easier than that? Hardly. This recipe makes 1 cup of delicious summery dressing, which is plenty more than 1 serving so I have a nice little jar left over to use for the rest of the week. That gives me just enough time to whip up something else, maybe using some of the mint we planted last month or a bit of the forest of chives in my rock garden. Suddenly, there’s just no excuse for buying bottled dressings at the store. Except maybe just one for backup – a nice Newman’s Balsamic or something basic like that…

I should note that this recipe used up only the teeniest, tiniest fraction of the mountain of tarragon I hacked out of the garden today. But in my recipe research, I read that tarragon freezes ridiculously easily, and can just as easily be hung up to dry – and the dried stuff you buy in a jar apparently loses its taste within a year, so mine must want to be replaced. So I’m off to find some twine with which to string up my tarragon bounty. Who needs to spend $5 for a tiny spice bottle at the store when there are more herbs in the garden than you can shake a stick at?

 

Read Full Post »