Salad days

We love salad. Almost every day, we have a big one with dinner, and we often bring one in to school to eat with lunch. The usual ingredients are lettuce, tomatoes, red pepper, and cucumber, but we keep it interesting by adding things like carrot, daikon, beets, or celery and varying the extras: nuts, seeds, croutons, beans, and cheese. Sometimes I supplement the regular red leaf or romaine lettuce with baby greens, sorrel, kale, or herbs from my garden. Despite being a vegetarian since 2002, I was never much of a salad person until Jon and I started dating. He showed me that salads don't have to come from a bag* and are interesting and different every time. Now I miss them when I leave town for a few days. When I get back from a math conference or other out-of-town trip, I often call Jon from the airport and tell him to have a big green salad ready for me when I get home.

Every once in a while, I go crazy and make a wacky salad that doesn't even have lettuce! When we discovered the great new Chinese grocery store that's convenient to my tutoring gig, I bought these little yellow melons and tons of pea shoots. Here's a little salad I love that I've made a few times now.
Just chop up half a little yellow melon (I don't know a name for them), toast 1 tbsp sesame seeds, grate one carrot, and toss it together with a handful of pea shoots and blueberries. Green, sweet, crunchy, and springy. I didn't dress it. Maybe a squeeze of lemon juice and a drizzle of honey or agave nectar, maybe some almond oil? But it was good naked too.

I don't have any other good salad pics on this computer right now, but I might update this post with some salads of which we are especially proud.

* We don't buy bagged salad greens, but I am certainly not opposed to them. We eat salads regularly enough that the lettuce rarely goes bad, and we have time to wash and tear the lettuce leaves each time we make a salad, but I completely understand that bagged greens are more convenient, and that convenience might be the difference between eating a salad and having lettuce rot in your fridge. So if bagged salad greens work for you, go for it! Anything that leads to a larger number of salads eaten is good.