Until I was about 20, I never ate a salad. I hated salad.
Now, salad is my favorite food. But I feel it is widely misunderstood. Salad is not a bowl of lettuce or supermarket mesclun with wedges of cold off-season tomato and bottled dressing poured on top. (And by the way, how many ways can restaurants misspell the word mesclun? I know, restaurant menu typos are a classic white-person problem, but seriously, I have even seen it spelled “mescaline.”)
Salad, to me, is a carefully chosen, balanced selection of greens and a few other items tossed with oil and lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper. Period.
The place that changed my mind about salad was Russia. I visited a family at their dacha outside St. Petersburg, where they spent their summer weekends. It was very basic, with no indoor plumbing except for a cold-water kitchen sink. Their grandmother lived at this dacha full-time in the summer and was an avid gardener. Almost all their food came from her garden, and they made a salad from vegetables they harvested twice every day — at lunch and again at dinner. Their salad contained freshly cut lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions, and, most memorably, loads of fresh parsley and dill. Everything was chopped small. They added a chopped soft-boiled egg or two (from their hens), and dressed it with plain vegetable oil, distilled white vinegar, salt and pepper. It was amazing.
Another misunderstanding about salad is that it is easy to prepare. Usually, it’s not. It is the most time-consuming dish I make, and I generally try to avoid time-consuming dishes. But salad is a labor of love.
A good salad can make a meal. I prefer to have it with the main meal, as a counterpoint to whatever protein I am serving. In the summertime, I like to serve grilled meat or fish, salad, and bread for dinner. That is really all you need.
Today was a perfect spring day. Since my Sang Lee CSA has not started yet, I went to Briermere Farm in Riverhead to see what they had. Briermere is a good place to go in the spring, because Riverhead averages 5-10 degrees warmer than the south fork, so their products are usually harvested earlier. There is a reason that Riverhead has been an agricultural center for generations: it’s a great place to grow fruits and vegetables. Briermere has fantastic fruit. They use this fruit in their delicious pies and baked goods for which they are justly famous, but I rarely buy those because they are way too caloric. I just buy the fruit, and sometimes also vegetables.
The great “fruit writer” David Karp had an article in the New York Times a few years ago about rhubarb, in which he noted that Briermere has five acres planted with rhubarb — probably the largest in the state. Five acres is a lot of rhubarb!
They had rhubarb today, of course (it’s always one of the first crops of the season), but I didn’t buy any. I just bought veggies. This was my haul.
It’ll take several days for me to use all of this stuff. Tonight’s menu was grilled pork chops, grilled asparagus, salad, and bread.
The pork chops I marinated in an ad-hoc asian marinade, with soy, rice wine, sesame oil, sriracha, sugar, ginger and worcestershire sauce.
The asparagus I tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and grilled them after I took the pork chops off the grill. This is a great way to prepare asparagus.
The salad contained baby arugula, scallion greens, multicolor greenhouse cherry tomatoes, grown on the North Fork and sold at Briermere, and a few crumbles of Maytag Blue cheese. I like salads that have a little bit of something rich —like an egg, avocado, bacon, or cheese — and in this case, the Maytag Blue did the trick.
I always use the same method of dressing salad. First, I drizzle it lightly with olive oil and sprinkle it with fleur du sel and pepper, then I toss it with my hands. Then I drizzle on red wine vinegar and toss it again. Fini!
The salad was simple but good, mostly because Briermere’s baby arugula was extremely delicate, but still had a strong peppery bite that is missing from lots of plastic-box baby arugula. I’ve bought full-grown arugula from Briermere later in the summer season in past years, and it’s always super-spicy. These babies were obviously thinned from that future crop.
My picture doesn’t do it justice. If I am going to have a real blog, I am going to have to learn proper food photography!
farmhopper 
