On Salads, Over Eager Pumpkins, and Tomatoes

Today I harvested the last of my lettuce. I have 7 full heads of lettuce in my fridge. My husband and I take two weeks to go through a head. This will not stay good for 14 weeks. My psudo-kraut is still fermenting, so I don't know if that's a viable preservation method yet. Also it kind of scares me. It looks and smells evil. I've been reassured by my friendly neighborhood food scientist (don't you have one of those?! They're so handy!) that yes, it is supposed to look and smell evil because it's rotting. In a controlled way that hopefully leads to food. But still. Rotting. On my counter. Yum.

Anyhow! Lettuce has one primary use. Salads. So lets talk salad for a minute my friends. Salads are like the box of chocolates of the vegetable consumption world. You can put almost anything on them, in almost any combination, and you *should* be ok. They can be hot, cold, warmed slightly, or be generally cold with a hot protein. Or something. This has started to get away from me. Salads are easy is my point. They don't take a lot of time to make and with the sheer number of combinations you can put together? They don't have to be boring.

That being said, I find salads boring. A salad is not a meal, it isn't even a side dish. It's a rabbit food garnish. I grew up with salads coming from a bag with iceberg lettuce, carrots, and red cabbage already mixed in. You dumped it into a bowl, slathered  in in dressing and you were good to go. Anything else was for special occasions because adding tomatoes and cucumbers take effort. For every day salads? I was child one of three with two very busy full time parents. Meal times needed to be quick, easy, filling, and cheap.

However! I am currently in the middle of an Apocalypse of Lettuce, and that means figuring out how to make salads that aren't boring and are a meal in and of themselves. Challenge accepted dear readers, challenge accepted.

Today I made:

Lemon/Dill Salmon Green Salad

You need:

Olive oil
a splash of lemon juice (I'd estimate half a lemon's worth)
Salt
pepper
garlic powder
dried dill
Salmon filet
Lettuce
Fresh sugar snap peas
Pickled sugar snap peas
Pickled onions

Heat the olive oil in the pan. Ad the lemon juice, salt, pepper, dill, garlic and salmon. Cook covered on low heat, flipping occasionally, until the salmon is cooked all the way through. Then turn up the heat and fry your salmon uncovered for a few seconds on each side to make a tasty crust.

While that's cooking, wash your lettuce and fresh peas. Put them in a bowl. Add the pickled onions and snow peas (I'll post a recipe for those tomorrow). Top with your hot and tasty salmon. Eat.

This doesn't need dressing. The pickle juice from the peas combines in the bowl with the juice and fat from the salmon and makes a tasty vingery dressing all its own.

Now that that's out of the way, lets move on to the other things in Fwigf.

My pumpkins. As I mentioned before I'm growing long island cheese pumpkins. They don't taste like cheese, they're sweet pie/preservation pumpkins. They're called cheese pumpkins because they look like wheels of cheese apparently.

My pumpkins are planted along the back of Fwigf. Right by a chain link fence. You clever darlings can surely see where this is headed. Yes. They started climbing the chain link. I think I'm going to let them. I'll make little slings for the pumpkins as they develop but I'm just going to let them climb the fence. Better than having them invade my neighbor's plot I suppose.

Tomatoes. My poor tomatoes.  I hadn't been weaving them in their trellis. And they're getting rather large and were starting to fall over. Thankfully I was able to save them and weave them into their support system. Let's see if this helps. They are developing little green tomatoes.  See?