Salad with herring and small potatoes

As much as I like to complain about how expensive the Dupont Circle farmer's market is (6+ dollars for a single tomato??), there are plenty of reasons why I go back as often as I can. Last weekend, I found the most beautiful head of lettuce there for only 3 dollars. Compared with the 4-5 bucks you can spend for a few ounces of organic bagged greens that goes bad in a few days, this is totally worth it. In fact, I've stopped buying pre-bagged salads altogether in favor of this technique. Now, I am much happier with the quality of my greens and my salad budget.



The single head of lettuce took up my entire salad spinner and lasted several salads. (Next to the spinner is a bunch of Erba Stella, which is an Italian herb with a light, savory taste -- I highly recommend sauteing it with a little garlic in pasta or tossing it in a salad for some color contrast against some beautiful Boston lettuce) One of the salads I made more than once is this one, which was adapted from a recent Serious Eats post. I used canned herring instead of tuna because I like the texture and flavor of the former much much more but you can use pretty much any canned fish you'd like.

Greek Salad

My trip to China was great (pictures of roasted baby pigeons to come), but frankly, after two weeks of half-familiar vegetables and proteins swimming in a pool of MSG-infused oil, I was really excited about coming back and eating some crunchy, non-greasy foods. Solution? A diet consisting of cereal and salad has never tasted so delicious and chemical*-free.

The Dupont Circle farmers market was going on the day I got back. Not only was it nice to walk around in the beautiful weather under blue skies, which incidentally, I saw precisely twice on my entire trip to China, but it was also great to see all the wonderful produce I can start playing around with. I bought some lovely little Persian cucumbers, which are infinitely tastier, crispier, and more fragrant than their fat, overly seeded and thick-skinned counterparts, whose existence is as inexplicable to me as America's obsession with chicken breast. Seeing those cucumbers immediately inspired me to make a Greek salad.

The laziest cook...

... just roasts a bunch of random things in the oven,



puts them over a salad, and calls it dinner.