OLS 6: the garden in a salad bowl

This week's One Local Summer meal: another omelet and a salad. But to call it a salad is to reduce it, to flatten it out. There should be another word for a salad like this that doesn't put it into the same category as a bowl of iceberg lettuce with a few carrot shavings and a stiffly crimped slice of cucumber.

Salad Gathered from the Garden

a handful of cherry tomatoes (I used Sweet 100s and the volunteer yellow pear tomatoes from last year)

a handful of grean beans

the kernels off 1 ear of corn (leftover from last night's dinner)

a handful of basil (I used purple)

2-3 stalks of lemon thyme

a few fronds of dill, and another few of chives

sea salt

olive oil

cider vinegar

I steamed the green beans a little, until they were cooked a bit but still crisp. Then sliced the corn off the cob, cut the cherry tomatoes in half, and tore the herbs by hand--mixed altogether in the yellow bowl I inherited from my mother. A sprinkle of sea salt, a glug-glug of oil and a glug of vinegar, a few tosses, and it was ready. I didn't measure the oil or vinegar, but it was probably about 3 tbs of oil and 2 of vinegar. Everything local except for the last 3 ingredients, and from the garden except for the corn, which was from the local bins at Giant Eagle. Yes, Giant Eagle Supermarkets have gone local, in a small way, which I like to think I've contributed to by constantly annoying them with questions about local products. I buy some of it every time I go, so as to encourage their efforts.

The omelet was excellent, too (Amish eggs and potatoes and onions from the farmers market) but it failed to keep its integrity when folded over and so couldn't make it as a cover girl (cover omelet?).

The best thing about this meal was the 10 minutes I spent in the garden with my basket (oh yes, I have a basket!), gathering up what looked ripe and imagining the salad into being--a bit of this, a pinch of that. The essence of local.