Spring Green Salad

Something about all the baking I’ve been doing lately made me have a green attack today. I had a deep and abiding need to eat as much greenery as possible. A few days ago I saw an amazing salad on the edible mosaic blog. It was of the layered sort except it was all greens. It was lovely. So I went to Whole Foods today on a mission to buy every salad worthy green item in the produce section. After 5 minutes of scurrying, my basket contained an impressive array: romaine lettuce, red leaf lettuce, green cabbage, asparagus, frozen petite peas, broccoli, scallions, zucchini, endive and avocado.

Of course I then scampered over to the meat counter and got 6 big old slices of bacon because I felt for a moment like I was swerving off into a vegetarian place that I didn’t want to go to…and darn it, salads just rock with bacon on them. So I chopped, parboiled and processed my way to this green delight.

Greens:
1 cup frozen petite peas
1 crown of broccoli, florets separated and cut small
1 pound asparagus, top 5 inches or so
1 endive, sliced into ½ inch rounds
1 head romaine lettuce
1 head red leaf lettuce
¼ head of green cabbage, sliced thinly
1 zucchini, julienned
4 scallions, chopped thinly, whites and a little green

Dressing:
½ packet Powdered Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing
½ cup sour cream
½ cup buttermilk
½ cup mayonnaise
1 avocado, halved and seeded

Here is the drill basically:

Wash everything. Chop up the asparagus and broccoli into bite sized pieces. Start a pan of water on the stove to parboil the broccoli, asparagus and peas. Prepare a bowl of water and ice to stop the broccoli and asparagus and peas from cooking. Chop and cook the bacon and then remove to a plate with a paper towel on it. Thinly slice the cabbage, endive, and scallions. Tear up the lettuces.

When the water is boiling, first throw in about a cup of frozen peas. After no more than two minutes, use a strainer to remove them to the ice bath. Then add the broccoli and asparagus to the boiling water and likewise, remove them to the ice bath after about 90 seconds. You do not want to “cook” them so much as make them slightly not raw anymore…(yes, I know that makes no sense…but you know what I mean, don’t you?). After the boiled veggies are cool, you can drain the water and dry the veggies on a paper towel.

I tried not to use a packet of pre-fab powdered salad dressing. I tried to work up the energy to create a dressing masterpiece.  I wanted a ranch type of dressing with avocados mixed in.  And then I decided it was crazy to not use it just to be able to say I didn’t use it, when I like it. It is the Campbell’s Cream of Whatever dilemma. You would like to think you could do it better and fresher and more healthful. But sometimes the old standby is just what the doctor ordered and in this case it certainly was. So for the dressing, put all of the ingredients, except the avocados, into the bowl of your food processor. Process them until they are smooth. Cut in half and remove the seed of the avocado. Add it to the dressing in the food processor and continue to process until the dressing is smooth again. If you are crazy about avocados, I think it could have handled two whole avocadoes, but I only had one so that is what I did.

It is imperative that you let your greens dry, or blot them well with a paper towel. Get a big bowl and in two rounds layer in a bit of everything in whatever proportions you like. I only used the top 4 inches or so of the asparagus, chopped in small pieces, but I used the whole pound. I used a large crown of broccoli, a whole endive, one whole romaine head, one whole red leaf lettuce head, one chunkily julienned zucchini minus the seed core, 6 slices of bacon, about 4 scallions, about a quarter to a third of a head of cabbage, and one avocado which is thrown into the dressing so don’t fret if it isn’t the perfect specimen.

This makes one massive bowl of green stuff.

Now, I prepared this in the manner of a layered salad, in that I put the dressing on top of this pile of greens and held it in the fridge for a few hours. I will probably not do that next time because I think it made it a little watery. I will also do a more thorough job of drying my greens. But this salad was delicious.  It made three massive entrée size salads. I felt like I added a year to my life consuming that many greens in one day.

Please try it and let me know if you think of any greens that I should add next time around.