Contents of this week’s box: Green leaf lettuce, strawberries, hakurai turnips, radishes, cabbage, tomato, bag of lettuce, bag of spinach, green onions.
Dozens of salads. That’s my forecast for our household this week.
And that means I will be keeping a half dozen pint jars of salad dressing in the refrigerator so it’s easy to assemble a salad when the impulse strikes. Lately I’ve been making miso dressings, mostly because I found I had accumulated three different containers of miso from recipe testing. Time to use those up.
The simplest dressing is one from thekitchn.com, made with just two ingredients. The general proportions are one teaspoon miso to 1 tablespoon fresh citrus juice. The juice could be lemon, could be lime, could be orange.
Then there’s the three ingredient miso dressing: 1/3 cup tahini, 1 tablespoon miso, 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Also from thekitchn.com. Optional additions are ginger, garlic, parsley, green onions, rice vinegar, sesame seeds and soy sauce.
The third variation on the theme is miso-cashew dressing. There are lots of versions because it’s a stellar combination that really highlights the sweetness of the cashews. I soak 1 cup of cashews overnight, then drain and put them in a blender with 1/2 cup water, 2 tablespoons miso, a tablespoon of unseasoned rice vinegar and a little bit of sesame oil. Blend. Done. You can make it as thick or thin as you like by working with the proportion of water.
The recipe pages at grassfedcow.com have at least a dozen more dressing ideas. Browse the lettuce pages for shallot vinaigrette, basic vinaigrette, buttermilk green onion dressing (a classic combination that we feature in coleslaw, too) and creamy lemon dressing.
I’m sure you figured out what I didn’t realize until several days into the week, those bags of spinach and frisee-type lettuces were freshly washed when they were packed. I had tucked the bags into the refrigerator thinking to deal with the huge whole heads of lettuce first. Then days later I discovered a half inch of water in the bottom of those two bags and some very waterlogged leaves which ended up in the compost. I quickly emptied the bags, dried out the remaining spinach and lettuce, and moved it all to a cotton produce bag to await use. It was a good reminder that making 30 minutes or so to prep the contents is a necessary investment when the box arrives. It really does keep delight of the abundant harvest from turning into disappointment.
So salads sorted, I am going to grill those green onions and make Buttermilk Coleslaw with Green Onions and Cilantro.
But what to do with two giant hakurei turnips? I’m going to turn them into pikliz, a recipe I learned last year when doing a story on Haitian food. I find myself craving this – which is great since craving cabbage and carrots is a good thing, right? So part of that big cabbage in the box and shreds of these turnips are going to sit in the vinaigrette of hot pepper-spiked vinegar and citrus juice. Then the pikliz be available for adding to sandwiches, tacos and just munching from the jar. I have the very last cup of pepper vinegar I made last year from some of Riverview’s hot peppers and I’ll finish it off this week in pikliz.
conne ward-cameron