BLT Pasta Salad

Red food stuff is a popular trend at the moment. Good leafy crops add vibrancy to a salad and you are probably eating well if you grow them yourself.

Mesclun is a name for a traditional melange of salad leaves. The name mesclun doesn’t feature in any of my gardening reference books before 1980 so old gardeners may not recognise the term.

When you hear the word salad, what comes to mind? Leafy greens? Chicken? Potatoes?

Strawberry season is one of my favorite times of the year. I always look forward to the sweet taste of locally grown strawberries. There are so many ways we can use these strawberries in recipes – pies, jam, muffins, and so much more! One of my favorites is this strawberry salad with candied pecans and pretzels. The pretzels add a perfect balance of salty with the rest of the sweet salad, and the pecans and pretzels add a wonderful crunch to the creamy salad. Enjoy!

This broccoli, apple, pecan salad combines many of our favorite Fall foods. Enjoy for a quick and easy fall salad!

1 tbsp light mayonnaise 2 tbsp reduced-fat sour cream 1 tsp fresh lemon juice ¼ tsp cinnamon 1 cup (¾-inch) coarsely chopped Bartlett pear (about 1 pear) 1 cup medium apple, chopped (about 1 apple) 1 cup small seedless red grapes, cut in half 2 T chopped walnuts

Salad:

Salad:

They never even consider winter crops. A mere dozen lettuce seeds, sown every 10 days from late winter through late summer, the earliest ones indoors for set-out later, will guarantee a small household plenty of fresh, succulent salad greens early spring through late fall. Don’t plant 10 feet of row of lettuce at a time—3 or 4 feet at most is more like it, since lettuce doesn’t keep. And even with those 12 seeds, I like to mix it up a bit, alternating 6 each of two varieties at each planting, so I have a blend of colors, tastes and textures in every bowlful.There are three basic categories of lettuces, the earliest being the looseleaf kind, which take only 45-60 days to mature. ‘Black-Seeded Simpson,’ at 45 days, is about the quickest of all, so don’t be without it. Another non-heading lettuce I always grow is ‘Oakleaf,’ with beautiful ruffled leaves shaped like its namesake’s. There are red forms now, like ‘Flame,’ or various improved v

I love thee simply roasted, then skinned, sliced and tossed with Balsamic and oil—beets vinaigrette, so to speak, and a salad unto itself. (For a variation on the dressing, use fresh orange juice in place of some of the vinegar.)I love thee (vinaigrette and all) on top of tender salad greens, whose slightly sweet taste offsets your all-undergroundly, Fruit-of-the-Earth flavor.I love thee even better when a dollop of warmed chevre and a handful of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) are the third and fourth layer in the above-described deal (top photo).And sweetheart, you aren’t bad with crumbles of blue cheese and eith

I already sowed my first short rows of salad greens and arugula, one in the coldframe and one in open ground. The protected ones are up; I’ll repeat the modest sowings in open ground every 10 days or two weeks all season long, a little bit at a time, for a continuous bowl of greens. This is how I sow salad stuff.My seed potatoes—which is what small potatoes for planting are called—should be arriving before long, and will go into the garden late this month. How I plant potatoes.My asparagus bed

‘WHAT GOES WITH WHAT?’ gardeners often ask, hungry for perfect perennial pairings, or the fodder of harmonious annual containers. Cooks putting together a menu are really asking what goes with what, too. In her latest reference-and-cookbook “Vegetable Literacy,” Deborah Madison asks—and answers—the question at multiple levels, including the intriguing taxonomic one, as in: Who’s a botanical cousin to whom (and how can that inform our cooking)? Get Madison’s recipe for one of my favorite pastas—with cauliflower and red pepper flakes—and maybe win one of two extra copies of this thoughtful work, just out this week, that I bought to share. Each chapter of this newest book by Madison, author of “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” is named for one of a dozen plant families—the carrot family, for sample, or Umbelliferae, with ingredients from cilantro to cumin, celery to fennel, parsley and parsnips and more.  We gardeners probably know the Brassicaceae (the cabbage family) and the Solanaceae (tomatoes and such) and of course the legumes or Fabaceae (peas and beans). But we don’t really talk about what cousins of sunflowers we eat (the family Asteraceae or Compositae), for instance.  (Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, artichokes, tarragon, and chicories are examples.)