First Salad

A favorite book series when my kids were little was A Voyage to the Bunny Planet by Rosemary Wells.  By far, our favorite book in the collection was First Tomato and we referenced it every year in the garden when that first red orb was ready for picking.

Well, it's much too early for tomatoes here in northwest New Jersey, but I thought of the book today as I picked the first salad greens of the summer.  And I continued to think about it as I prepared my first salad.  And obviously, I am in love with it.  (The salad and the book.)

Thanks to the grub infestation, my lettuces are later than usual, but eradication of the grubs (mostly by hand-picking) and a second planting are now reaping the ingredients for a 100% organic green salad.  Today I picked speckled buttercrunch, (regular) buttercrunch, spinach, arugula, and cilantro for my salad.

Speckled buttercrunch is my favorite.  Of course, it's pretty, but it also has a crispness to it that makes it more substantive than some other more fragile lettuces.  Spinach is probably one of the healthiest greens one could eat.  (Popeye knew what he was talking about.)  I prefer the young leaves.  Arugula is known as "rocket" most every other place in the world.  It has a very distinct flavor, a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing.  I happen to love it, but arugula alone can be a little too strong.

And here's the interesting thing about the cilantro.  One of my first posts when I started this blog was about falling in love with a stinkbug, remember?  I referenced the fact that when crushed, the smell of the stinkbug is often described as like cilantro.  I happen to like cilantro.  (Can there be guacamole without it?)  So I really didn't mind the smell of the stinkbug.

But when I picked the cilantro today and added it to my salad, all I could think of was that the salad now smelled like a stinkbug!  Yes, instead of stinkbugs smelling like cilantro, now cilantro smells like a stinkbug!  Damn!

But that did not stop me from falling in love with my first garden salad of the summer.  And I am looking forward to many more.