Salad Days, Part 3

For this salad, I harvested a mahogany burnished head of self-seeded lettuce.

Also from the garden, I collected a handful of pink fava blossoms, some Egyptian onion greens, and a small bunch of young salad burnet leaves. To this combination, I added peeled grapefruit sections from a friend's tree and slivers of aged cheddar. I dressed the salad with a grapefruit-poppy seed dressing, made from a little mayo, salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar, olive oil, a splash of reserved grapefruit juice collected from peeling the grapefruit sections, and a generous spoon of poppy seeds.

While the dressing was a nice balance of bitter, sweet, and textured, what surprised me about this salad was how much I loved the salad burnet in it. This warm weather feels like summer, making it just right to have the herbal cucumber flavor of salad burnet in the combination. The salad matched the day.

Don't know what salad burnet is? Try growing it. A ferny plant with soft, geometrically folded leaves, it is one of the rare perennial vegetables, and it grows well in nearly every climate.