Salad Days

There's some bad news about good stuff. Your local farmers' market is fast becoming the only place you're going to get your greens, salad greens that is.  Drought in California's Central Valley and overuse of irrigation water in the Salinas Valley, the "salad bowl of America", is quickly limiting the lettuce supply, especially those gorgeous heads of Romaine you need for Caesar salad. So grab the local lettuce and eat until you're sick of it because you might not get any good stuff this coming winter and if indeed you do, you might have to mortgage your home for it.

Better yet, practice making salads that don't need lettuce. In earlier posts this summer I passed on a terrific crunchy, tasty recipe for celery date salad with roasted almonds and mint. I passed on roasted chioggia beet salad with walnuts, dill and goat cheese. There's always Greek salad, German cucumber salad (recipe in How to Fix a Leek....the book), French carrot and parsley salad (recipe in Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking), Nepali peanut salad (recipe posted very recently) and the great Italian panzanella: fresh basil leaves with tomatoes, garlic croutons and all the trimmings. Here's one recipe for it:

Serves 6

(This is how to use day-old bread)

6 thick slices Tuscan, French or Levain bread (any very crusty, dense bread)

2 sm red onions, sliced into thin rings

1 lg green bell pepper, diced into bite-sized pieces (about 1” sq)

4 med/lg freshly ripe tomatoes (these are the star of this show), chunked

½ cup shredded Parmesan, Romano or Asiago cheese

12 black olives, pitted

1 tbsp capers (optional)

½ cup fresh basil leaves, finely chopped

¼ cup fresh flat leaf parsley, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp red wine vinegar

½ cup best quality olive oil + 3 tbsp more

Freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste

*Put 3 tbsp olive oil in a shallow bowl. Cut bread into bite sized chunks and soak in the oil.

Toast the bread at 400º for 5 minutes or until crunchy and browned.

*In a small bowl, whisk together garlic, salt, vinegar and olive oil to make a dressing.

*Put toasted bread into the bottom of a large serving bowl. Add the onion rings, chunked tomatoes and diced pepper. Add olives, cheese and herbs.

*Pour on the dressing and blend everything. Season liberally with black pepper freshly ground and serve.

  *   *   *   *   *

If you want to take advantage of all those luscious tomatoes coming at you, slice 'em thin, arrange on a platter and dress with fragrant rosewater this way: 

Combine the following in a small bowl and whisk to blend. This will serve 6-8 and last a few days.

 2 tbsp rosewater
2 tbsp olive oil
4 tsp cider vinegar
 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
Salt
*   *   *   *   *   *
And don't forget slaw! The recipe for a colorful one is in Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking.  Variations are easy to improvise. Right now at the end of July, you could shred kohlrabi, Hakurei turnips aka Tokyo or salad turnips, carrots, scallion greens and purple cabbage. You can season that with sea salt, black pepper and a few crushed caraway seeds plus lemon juice and olive oil.

I'll post more salad as winter gets closer.

And now for some worse news, at least for kale freaks.  Here's the latest word from the masterful Tom Philpott on why you should back off a bit:

...today's kale-fixated juice-heads may doing themselves a disservice.
That's a possibility raised by an article in Craftsmanship magazine by Todd Oppenheimer. The piece doesn't establish a definitive link between heavy kale consumption and any health problem, but it does raise the question of whether too much of even a highly nutritious food like kale can have unhappy side effects.
The article focuses on an alt-medicine researcher and molecular biologist named Ernie Hubbard, who began to notice an odd trend among some of his clinic's clients in California's Marin County, a place known for its organic farms, health-food stores, and yoga studios. Extremely health-conscious people were coming into to complain of "persistent but elusive problems": "Chronic fatigue. Skin and hair issues. Arrhythmias and other neurological disorders. Foggy thinking. Gluten sensitivity and other digestive troubles. Sometimes even the possibility of Lyme Disease."
Hubbard began to find detectable levels of a toxic heavy metal called thallium in patients' blood samples—at higher-than-normal levels—as well as in kale leaves from the region. Meanwhile, "over and over," he found that patients complaining of symptoms associated with low-level thallium poisoning—fatigue, brain fog, etc.—would also be heavy eaters of kale and related vegetables, like cabbage.
And he found, in a peer reviewed paper by Czech researchers, evidence that kale is really good at taking up thallium from soil. The paper concluded that kale's ability to accumulate soil-borne thallium is "very high and can be a serious danger for food chains." There's also a peer reviewed 2103 paper from Chinese researchers finding similar results with green cabbage; a 2015 Chinese study finding green cabbage is so good at extracting thallium from soil that it can be used for "phytoremediation"—i.e., purifying soil of a toxin—and a 2001 one from a New Zealand team finding formidable thallium-scrounging powers in three other members of the Brassica family: watercress, radishes, and turnips.
Now, just because kale and other Brassicas can effectively take up thallium from soil doesn't mean that they always contain thallium. The metal has to find its way into soil first. It exists at low levels in the Earth's crust, and the main way it gets concentrated at high enough levels to cause worry is through "nearby cement plants, oil drilling, smelting, and, most of all, in the ash that results from coal burning," Oppenheimer reports. The researcher he profiled, Hubbard, has so far not succeeded in nailing down the source of the thallium that he found in his kale samples.
And there's also the question of quantity. One of Hubbard's patients with heightened thallium levels in her urine and mild symptoms of thallium poisoning ate so much cabbage over the years that  she called herself the "cabbage queen." When she "cut way back" on her favorite vegetable, she tells Oppenheimer, her thallium levels dropped, and her symptoms improved.
Where does all of this evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, leave us—beyond the need of much more research on US-grown kale? There's nothing here that makes me want to stop eating Brassicas...
But it does make me wary of downing Brassicas daily at great quantities over extended periods, the way some people may be doing as part of the juice craze.

Another reminder that moderation is everything.