Dressing June’s leaves: Monthly Dressing

It was back to Salad Dressing Wars this week. Having been out of the competition for the last two months, at the last minute one of the contestants couldn’t make it, so I stepped in. Lots of chard in the mix of leaves and mizuna, which isn’t too strong.

You will also see some variegated nasturtium leaves in the salad bowl. These add a lovely mustardy flavour.

So I mixed roasted-then-crushed sunflower seeds with lemon, ginger, garlic and a little olive oil and seasoned with soya sauce and black pepper. This gave a really strong flavour, and only just managed to creep into the winning position against Ximena’s fantastically piquant offering.

Ru reckoned it had that gado-gado feel about it and everyone was surprised that it was sunflower seeds rather than peanuts. It’s interesting how different dressings appeal to different people. My dressing was described as ’simple, not too many flavours’ and as ‘unusual and complex’ by someone else!

The sunflower seeds make this dressing crunchy and delicious. If I am honest it was a bit of a cheat including them in the dressing. I normally scatter some roasted seeds on my salad to make it super tasty, but I knew that we wouldn’t do that at the site, so had to just throw them in the dressing…

And the recipe for you to try at home:

A handful of sunflower seeds, roasted* and then smashed
Juice of a lemon
An inch of ginger and one clove of garlic, both finely chopped
A generous splash of soya sauce
A few grinds of a pepper mill
And a couple of glugs of good olive oil

*If you haven’t done this before, it’s easiest to toast the seeds in a dry pan on the top of the stove, lessening the chance of your forgetting them to burn in the oven…

Super special salsola

Have you ever eaten samphire? It’s a plant well known to all good foragers out there, salty, succulent, delicious and, best of all, free.

Well, indulging in a little seed searching at the beginning of the year I came across salsola soda from The Real Seed Catalogue,* described as ‘a beautiful ‘candelabra’ shape and crisp, crunchy thin leaves.’ I just had to grow it. And making the case for its similarity to the wild samphire, and Ru’s own love for that, it was an easy step to persuading him that we should try our hand at cultivating it for our salad bags. So I’m trialling it at my Clissold site, admittedly in the smallest bed we have but still, we’re giving it a go.

Perhaps I’m writing this blog just a little late for those of you out there who might want to try it, as The Real Seed Catalogue is out of stock of the seeds until December but, just in case you are a member of our box scheme, that’s what those unusual leaves in your salad bags are. I sowed the seeds directly into the soil, as per the instructions on the packet, and sowed a tray at home too, just to keep an eye on their progress.

Having not planted them before, I gave the seeds our usual salad spacing to be safe, a trowel’s length between the plants and 20 cm between the rows, so that you can easily hoe out any weeds. The directly sown seeds grew much quicker than my home sown tray but it was good to know what they looked like as they poked up a spindly shoot and then developed their ‘leaves’. As the shoot grows it separates into many ‘pieces’ – the candelabra description is just perfect, take a look…

This week Ru and I discussed when would be best to harvest it. It was only later when I was weeding the bed, that I realised that they were ready to be picked. So I tried a technique of pinching out the inner tips to get a lovely little sprig. A small, exploratory harvest, to be sure, but one that gleaned great delight from Ru and the other apprentices when I arrived at Springfield, bearing my special leaves.

If you’re lucky enough to get some in your bag over the coming weeks, enjoy!

* The Real Seed Catalogue is an excellent source of vegetable seeds. Every keen gardener I have spoken to speaks of them with almost a reverent awe, as though they are their own secret supplier of all vegetables wonderful and unique. They are not strictly organic but many are heirloom varieties, grown for good taste and variety. The seeds come packaged with what feels like personal instructions to ensure that you get success with your sowings. And they encourage you to save your seeds, which is a far cry from most other seed companies who want you coming back for more, year after year. At the end of the day, you just know they are the real thing! Justifiable promotion ends…