Friday, June 12, 2009

My first harvest

On everyone else's gardening blogs, the praises are being sung of spring peas! onions! strawberries! etc etc blah blabbity bippity blah, as Denis Leary would say.

Well I am not so lucky, except for plenty of basil and cilantro which I have gleefully been picking here and there when needed (which is several times a week.)

On my last post I wondered when the mesclun greens would be ready.


Well, I decided it was time. Mostly b/c we're broke this week and i wanted some salad and did not want to buy it! I mean, this was the point of the garden, right? And I wish I had the time or inclination to keep a meticulous log like Sally of the Minton Stable Garden
of the costs and returns of my garden so I could figure out if I'm ever getting ahead in this game . . . . . but in the end, my plan of growing my own food so I could eat for free isn't really racing ahead like I figured it would.

I have to inform anyone considering growing mesclun greens, but harvesting them is no fun at all. I recommend cutting them very close to the leaf since you are going to be trimming all the stems off inside at the sink anyway. Because there are so many small leaves, there are so many surfaces and nooks and crannies to hold dirt and mud from all the rains we've been having. And in one colander of greens, i found four baby slugs lurking! I had to turn over each individual leaf - it felt like hundreds - to ferret them out. Can you imagine if we had been chomping away and bitten into a slimy little slug? I SHUDDER TO IMAGINE IT.

So anyway, I cleaned them all up, it took about 20 minutes, then added some very thin onion, sliced mushroom, and chickpeas. I wish I could have added tomatoes from my garden!! but oh well. And tossed in olive oil, s&p and tarragon vinegar.

Here is our salad!
On the side there is some tuna salad on olive loaf. I don't make my own bread as I am pretty busy with the growing my own food right now. I make my tuna salad these days with celery, red onion, and pickled jalapenos, worcestershire, lemon juice, s&p and minimal mayo and mustard. I also like to make it with celery, grated carrots, onions, and walnuts and mayo. Mmmmmm . . . .

When we were in Italy (Venice) they had little sandwiches all over the place that were tuna fish with just olive oil and sliced green olives and cracked black pepper mixed in. Mister Siren came to really love it.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Nice! that salad looked gorgeous!