Sans Fig Leaf
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"Salad days"
21 May, 2003
"What happened to our springtime?" one of my co-workers asked the other day.
"This is typical spring weather," I replied.
"I want more sun in my springtime, darn it!" she shot back.
We do get sunny days during the spring here, and they're nice, but the area wouldn't be as pretty, with all the trees and woodlands, if it didn't rain most of the year. Most of the places I lived as a kid tended to have rain a lot in the springtime, though not nearly as often as Seattle. That's one reason I think I'm so happy living here. The weather in the fall and winter and spring reminds me of spring time as a child.
When we started having sunny days almost as often as rainy days, it's definitely spring, and I start craving fresh fruit and vegetables. That often means craving salads. I confess that I have become quite addicted to a couple of brands of salad-in-a-bag. No, it doesn't taste as fresh as salads made the normal way, but then, even when I buy fresh lettuce and vegetables at the store, they seldom compare with my memory of salads made from greens and tomatos we had just picked out of our garden (or my grandparents' gardens) when I was a kid. So I live with the compromise. The bagged stuff is very convenient, and I very seldom stick to just the bag, because the salads don't have enough variety for me.
I just got spoiled as child.
Depending on the time of year, the salads we had when I was young might contain leaf lettuce or cabbage, radish greens or mustard greens or collard greens, green onion, cucumber, tomato, raw sweet peas, carrots, red radishes, white radishes, chunks of yellow squash or zuccini slices. All of which taste wonderful--to my taste buds, anyway. Each combination of three to six ingredients was a different medley of tastes and textures. And if one of the cooked vegetables of the meal were corn cobs we'd pulled off the stalk that day, I was in heaven!
I didn't get to try salads with ingredients like radiccio until I was much older, and no longer limited to what was growing in the garden. Now that I've learned the joys of salads with shrimp sprinkled in, or olives, or baby corn, or avocado slices, or pickled beets (I loved home pickled beets as a kid, why didn't it every occur to us to put them on salads? I don't know!), my salads can get a little crazy.
Lately, we've been picking up sprouts to mix in with the more traditional greens. My particular favorite is a mix called "spicy sprouts" which is alfalfa and radish and clover sprouts all mixed together. Spicy is definitely the way to describe it, with a hint of radish taste that is somehow very different from the taste of plain radishes or the radish greens. Most recently we tried onion sprouts, which I expected to be much more onion-tasting than they were. They were good, just much, much milder that I had expected.
Some people, I know, prefer very plain salads--just iceberg lettuce and tomatos for them. Others don't like salads (or any fresh vegetables) at all. I think I feel sorriest for them. Not just because of the health effects (which are real enough), but because there's so much fun and taste that they're missing out on!
I suppose it should be no surprise that I like salads with lots and lots of goodies added in. All of my interests tend that way. I like a wide variety of types of music, movies, books, and art. I love to write science fiction, mystery, comedy, fantasy, and action/adventure. There are certain themes that run through many of my favorites, but even there it is a number of themes, not simply one.
So, bring on the variety! Got something new? I'll give it a try, and maybe I'll mix it in with some familiar favorites, or just enjoy it every now and then on its own. No monochrome life for me, give me the whole spectrum!