How to create the perfect salad

I love a good salad as much as the next person – and by good salad I don’t mean one of the pre-packaged lettuce, tomato, cucumber and grated carrot variety.

A wonderful part of growing your own veg and eating with the seasons is that you can make a salad out of just about anything edible in the garden. For example, thanks to all the rain, my broccoli plants are super leafy monsters. These leaves are just as edible as the florets, so it seems almost criminal to waste them. There’s also chickweed wandering amongst the garlic, flowers galore on the borage, broccoli and Asian greens, and even a couple of dandelions worth picking. Growing wild beside the path are a couple of huge ancient carrots – way past eating but their ferny leaves aren’t.

For me, there are four elements to a seriously good salad:

Super fresh greens (or purples) – think lettuce, silverbeet, Asian greens, cabbage, purple cabbage, beetroot leaves, cucumber, parsley, celery, fennel or coriander

Protein and good fats – nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil – this balances the “greener” flavours and the fat increases absorption of vitamin K from the greens

Sweetness – try carrot, capsicum, apple, pear, grapes, tomatoes, strawberries, goji berries or roasted pumpkin

Acidity –a good dressing or vinegarette – it’s dead easy to make your own by combining olive oil and apple cider vinegar, like I have in the recipe below.

A great salad is just a matter of balancing the strong with the mild, mixing up the flavours and textures. Making it pretty and colourful honestly makes it taste better because of the messages good looking food sends to the brain, and all that colour also ensures you’re getting a wide variety of nutrients.

Use just a small amount of the bitter herbs and vegies like the dandelion, and finely shred the more robust leaves like the silverbeet. Include a good handful of nuts and seeds, and diced or sliced fruit. Smooth out the flavours with a good fat like avocado or olive oil, and a good dose of a decent vinegar for acidity.

Chickweed with dandelion flowers, carrot tops, borage flowers, broccoli and silverbeet

The below ingredients are simply what I had available in my community garden plot and in the pantry – substitute whatever you have handy in your garden or can pick up at the shops or the local farmers markets. Vegies that are freshly picked and in season are always best. If you want to save money but buy organic, I find my local farmers markets sell organic fruit and veg at half the price of the supermarkets.

I'd love to hear from you - what's your perfect salad combination?

My perfect salad with Spring flowers

Silverbeet (rainbow chard)

Broccoli leaves, florets and flowers

Tatsoi leaves and flowers

Borage flowers

Pumpkin seeds (pepitas)

Chickweed

Leafy carrot tops

Goji berries

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoon apple cider vinegar.

Put the oil and vinegar in a small jar, screw the lid on and shake well to create a vinaigrette. Finely chop the greens, add the vinaigrette and toss to coat – feel free to massage in the dressing using your hands to help tenderise the greens. Add the nuts, seeds and fruit and toss again. Decorate with the flowers and serve immediately. Really easy, really good.

Finding comfort in the pumpkin patch

I was planning to pop up to my community garden on the weekend, to have a play and get dirt under the nails while planting  out my little broccoli babies. But the weather disagreed – it was cold with gale force winds and an apparent temperature of just three degrees Celsius. What a day like that calls for is some serious comfort food.

 
Fortunately some of the best vegies for comfort food grow during summer, and pumpkin is at the top of the pile. Roast pumpkin, pumpkin soup, pumpkin scones, sweet pumpkin pie – I even make a spectacularly caramelly pumpkin ice cream. Pumpkin is not just versatile but easy to grow and use.

Healthy pumpkin plants need a few essential ingredients – a sunny, sheltered position, rich soil with lots of composty goodness, and space. Pumpkin plants need a few good metres around them, as they grow really big, and will also suffer from powdery mildew on the leaves if they don’t get enough sun or air. Sow your seeds direct in late spring or early summer, about 2cm deep, and you should see seedlings emerge in a week or two.

My community garden plot, where pumpkins and other vines grew happily around the corn last summer.

Unfortunately, my poor little pumpkin seedlings were eaten by slaters the minute they emerged. Next year, I’ll be sowing seeds in pots and growing the seedlings to a more resilient size before planting them. As luck would have it, a pumpkin plant self-sowed itself in my community garden plot in mid-Summer, producing two good-sized pumpkins before it was time to clear out the patch in late April. Pumpkins are best picked in April or May, before the first real frosts hit. Leave 10cm of stem attached and put the pumpkin in a sunny place for a few days to help it store better and longer.

Pumpkin soup

Leave a long stalk to help preserve your pumpkin.

Basic recipe: Cube half a kilo of pumpkin and either boil or steam in a large saucepan until soft. Roughly dice an onion, crush a few cloves of garlic and gently sauté them with olive oil in a pan over a medium heat until soft and translucent. Add to the pumpkin along with a litre of vegetable or chicken-flavoured stock. Using a stick blender, blend the saucepan’s contents until you have a soupy consistency. Bring to the boil, season to taste and serve with a dollop of coconut cream or natural yoghurt and a sprinkling of chives, coriander, nutmeg, or raw or roasted pepitas.

Variations: Roast your pumpkin first for a rich, super creamy flavour (recipe below), or try adding any vegies of choice – steamed potato, parsnips, broccoli, and zucchini all work really well. While you’re at it, why not chuck in some spice! Simple dry fry a few teaspoons spices – try a cumin, fennel and paprika combo, or your favourite curry powder.

Roast pumpkin salad

Turn the oven right up to around 200-220 degrees Celsius. Cube your pumpkin, leaving the skin on, and place it in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and that magical spice trilogy of paprika, cumin and turmeric, the merest pinch of cayenne pepper, and a good shake of salt. Chuck in some potatoes and sweet potato in while you’re at it. Toss to coat the vegies in the oil and spices and roast for around 30 minutes. At this high temperature the pumpkin will caramelise as it cooks, giving both fantastic flavour and texture. Serve toasty hot as part of any roast dinner.

If you can manage to save some of the pumpkin for lunch the next day, it will make a wonderful addition to any salad. Simply toss together with some shredded lettuce, cabbage and/or baby spinach, cubed or sliced avocado and scatter some fresh or roasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and sunflower seeds over the top. The crunch of the pepitas, the creaminess of the avocado, the divinely caramel pumpkin and freshness of the greens just all work perfectly. 

Roast pumpkin salad with iceberg lettuce, red cabbage, avocado and toasted pepitas and sunflower seeds.

Roast pepitas

Toss your pepitas and sunflower seeds in a little olive oil, roast in a 140 degree oven for 10-15 minutes, then stir through the same spices you’d use with your pumpkin. Serve hot as pre-dinner snack – they’re seriously moreish!