A Very Green Salad

Green salad by Joy & Cukes in Spicy Vinegar by Ed

Ed and I worked together at making dinner tonight.  First by walking up to the store after fresh ingredients.  This gave me some insight into all those scenes in historical novels or novel set in countries that still depend on daily excursions on foot to the market after that day's meal ingredients.  It can have its charms.

But I'd still prefer to have a kitchen stocked with a month's worth of staples and a week's worth of perishables and several months worth of frozen and canned.  That will take us some time to accumulate so we're shopping a few meals ahead and still usually find an ingredient missing for this or that.

Today Ed wanted mac and cheese and hotdogs which I did not want to fill up on though I do love mac and cheese especially when Ed makes it with real butter and half and half.  Sometimes with several kinds of cheese.  But that's got to be a side dish for me so I wanted a salad and one with substantial bulk, varied texture and flavors I liked.

So I walked up to Ray's market with Ed to pick out my ingredients in their produce aisle while he shopped for everything else.  They have a special section where you can get small 'servings' of the things you want.  A bit like a salad bar in a restaurant.  I selected a fistful each of snow peas, bean sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower from that salad bar and a bundle of green onion and a Romano tomato.  I already had avocado at home.

I also asked for a cucumber but not for the salad.  I wanted Ed to put together his cukes in spicy vinegar for me as a between meal munchie.  Not only do I love them but they are an appetite suppressant for me.  I can eat a couple of cuke coins and not need another thing for hours. I think it's the vinegar responsible for that but it helps to have to have chewed on something as well.

He spices it differently every time and its not pure vinegar but some ratio with water. As in tablespoons to cups or  something like that.  Salt and pepper are the base spices and sometimes the only ones.  Tonight he added garlic powder.  And the bowl was sitting there as I put together my salad and I got the idea of testing whether other veggies would be good after soaking in a vinegar bath so I tucked in a few snow peas and bean sprouts.

If I like them I'll start having him make for me or teach me how to make a vinegar bath with a variety of veggies.  I'd like to try radishes.  Because I don't care for radishes but I didn't care for cucumbers before I tried Ed's vinegared version.  Radishes would add some interesting color to a salad like the one I made tonight which was all green and white with a hint of purple in some of the lettus leaves before I added the tomato.  I meant to add some baby carrots which I already had in the fridge but they slipped my mind.  I wonder what carrot would taste like after a few hours in the vinegar?

I nibbled on the cuke while I made my salad (big enough for several meals as you can see as Ed isn't big on salad) and in the end I had a large serving of salad with Ed's honey-mustard vinegar dressing and a small serving of mac and cheese and turned down the hot dogs.