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.

Perfect for summer - chilled zucchini and leek soup

I can’t emphasise enough how perfect this chilled zucchini and leek soup is for an Australian summer – it’s refreshingly satisfying on a hot day like today, and every featured vegie is in season right now. It also takes all of 15 minutes to cook, plus chill time.

Wild fennel, green and yellow zucchini, leeks and garlic

The vegies in this soup are also all so easy to grow and exceptionally good for you – you can find out all about my zucchini crop here and my leek crop here. I’ve also previously mentioned how to grow potatoes here. Ironically, this year’s potato crop has failed to sprout but enough potatoes hid during the last harvest that they’ve grown a new crop all on their own! Each time I pull up a purple cabbage I get another handful of spuds – how perfect is that! The single potato in this recipe adds creaminess without making the soup stodgy.

The sautéed greens, ready for the potato and water.

 As forecast in my last post, the zucchinis have now hit their peak growth period, aka the glut, where they’re the perfect size for picking in three days but double that size within another two days! So this soup is also perfect for dealing with that zucchini that hid under the leaves and went unnoticed until it was suddenly as long as your forearm.

I’ve used a frond of wild fennel as it’s growing in my front yard but dill will work fine. Tarragon or lemon thyme would also taste great.

The soup can be served hot or cold depending on the temperature in your part of the world.

Chilled zucchini and leek soup

Serves 4

2 normal zucchini (or 1 forgotten zucchini), diced

2 leeks, white stalk only, chopped

3 cloves garlic, crushed

1 medium size potato, diced

A sprig of dill (or a fennel frond), chopped

Extra virgin olive oil

1.5 litres boiling water

Salt and pepper

Pour a good slosh of olive oil into a large saucepan over a low-medium heat. Add the leek and garlic and cook gently for the next several minutes, stirring regularly, until they’re soft and translucent. Add the zucchini and sauté for a few minutes, then add the potatoes, pour in the water, stick the lid on and cook for 5-10 minutes or until the potatoes are soft.

Add the fennel/dill and blend the soup until smooth. If you have a stick blender (also known as an immersion blender), you can blend the soup hot or cold. Otherwise, let it cool before putting it in a normal blender.

Season well with salt and pepper. If serving the soup chilled, add an extra pinch of salt as the cold does subdue the flavours a little.

Place in the fridge until cool, then serve immediately.

Chilled zucchini and leek soup with fennel pollen

Zucchini, strawberry and basil salad

There are a million reasons why to have your own vegie patch – because it makes vegies interesting, because you can grow truly organic produce, because everything tastes better when it’s home grown, because gardening is a superb form of meditation. 

My gorgeous yellow zucchini

But my number one reason is because there’s nothing so fulfilling as eating something amazing that was grown by you and picked only a few minutes earlier – it’s literally still growing! You don’t even need to know what you’re going to cook in advance.

Take this recipe for example. Up at my community garden plot I found my first zucchini of the season (hooray!), a good handful of strawberries that the slaters hadn’t found yet, and silverbeet that was super keen to be picked. Back home and my basil plants have doubled in size thanks to the recent rain. It only took about a minute to join the dots and come up with this fantastic salad.

Strawberries, silverbeet, zucchini and basil

Zucchini is so versatile – it can be steamed, sautéed, stir-fried, roasted, pickled, grated for fritters or spiralised into zoodles and used as a pasta substitute. But if you use it when it is super fresh, young and raw, it makes a slightly sweet and delicate addition to salads. It’s high in fibre, a swathe of vitamins and minerals and even omega 3 fatty acids. It’s easy to grow and – best news of all – it’s not late to plant them for a summer crop!

They’re best grown by planting the seed directly in a sunny spot, a metre apart, into soil that has been enriched with compost, manure and/or green manures. I have a slater plague in my garden, and one of their favourite foods is freshly germinated plant shoots, so I plant first into small pots and transplant the seedlings out when they reach about 10-15cm tall. If you do this, try to disturb the roots as little as possible during the transplant process.

Slaters love strawberries and young plants - and in my garden every other plant too!

Water regularly and protect the young plants from snails, slugs and other pests that can chew through the stalk overnight - natural options included crushed egg shells or human hair scattered around the plant. Try to water the roots and not the leaves to avoid disease, although they will probably still get powdery mildew as their health declines towards the end of summer – you can treat this through a range of organic means but it won’t typically affect the crop.

Zucchinis are super-fast and happy growers. I planted my seedlings out a month ago and have already picked my first two zucchinis, one from each plant. The fruit (yep, it’s not a vegetable!) also grow incredibly fast so check on them every day or two and pick when they’re at the desired size. Leave them for another week or two and they’ll be huge, still edible but relatively tasteless. Try to find a few different varieties to plant – I have the usual green type plus the vibrant yellow-skinned variety featured in this recipe.

Shaved zucchini

Zucchini, strawberry and basil salad

Serves 1 as a main, or 2 as side salad

One small zucchini

1-2 silverbeet leaves (or another young tender green)

A handful of strawberries

A sprig of fresh basil leaves

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

½ tsp extra virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper

Use a potato peeler to shave thin slices off the zucchini, stopping when you reach the seeds. Don’t throw the seed core out – I snack on it later, or use it in another meal or vegie stock. Put the slices in a bowl with the finely sliced silverbeet.

Put the vinegar, oil and a tiny pinch of salt and pepper into a small jar, screw the lid on tightly and shake vigorously. Pour over the zucchini mix and mix through with your hands to coat thoroughly. This will tenderise the vegies slightly as you prepare the strawberries.

Slice the strawberries in halves or quarters, depending on their size, and add with the chopped or torn basil to the bowl. Toss and serve immediately.

 
So easy, so good :)