Something snapped. Must have salad. All salad. The cute clamshell packaging for four miniature heads of lettuce drew me across the aisle with its tractor beams. Cute. Little. Four. Red. Green. Must have salad.
My love-hate relationship with plastic packaging was kicking in. Could the clamshell be a paint mixing pan, a mold, an alien space pod and trading post? Could Kirk and Spock contain the tribbles?
When let loose the four petite lettuces (let-tooses, of course) expanded exponentially. What looked like two or three lunches, now seems to be a whole lotta rabbit food lasting longer than my lifetime. And me with only six cherry tomatoes and the last pits of an olive bar attack. There's a pattern emerging. The olive bar container also had four sections and appeared potentially useful to art teachers, bead sorters, and hoarders.
Back in the Sixties, my dad Howie pronounced the Eastridge Iceberg Edict: No salad shall be served that consists of only lettuce and Zesty Italian dressing. French dressing was forbidden, as was jello fruit salad except the dark sweet pitted cherry one.
In junior high home ec class Mrs. Starr and Mrs. Meston tried to expose us to lettuce beyond iceberg. We had a lettuce tasting with bibb, romaine, loose leaf, iceberg, and curly endive. We wore the gingham aprons we had sewn.
Only Eeyore would eat endive, in my opinion. This photo is not really the Millard Lefler home ec classroom, but it's mighty close. From left that would be Janice, me, Debbie O. and Debbie B.! We practiced measuring vinegar and oil. We washed eggs before cracking them badly.
The group of mini-heads in the clamshell are petite green tango, petite red tango, petite gem and petite oak lettuce. They are O.K., but a little tickly, bitter, and lacy going down. They are not alone with the Zesty Italian. I gave them red bell pepper, steamed asparagus, cucumber, boiled shrimp, bacon fried with chopped garlic, cannellini beans, the final olives, and the six cherry tomatoes for friends. That's for Day One of Salad Season.
When I looked in the Tupperware crisper, I hadn't made a dent in the lettuce. It's still expanding. Soon it will be in all the air vents and hatches of the Enterprise. Adjust your rabbit ears and stay tuned.
© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder
3 comments:
I learned something I hadn't known about lettuce before not all that long ago. And that is that if you blow your breath into the airtight container you store it in, it keeps from spoiling a whole lot longer. I don't know if this is the most sanitary idea if you're serving salad to other people, but usually, I'm not.
Seana, I'll have to try that, although it does sound a bit like voodoo. I learned to put lettuce, spinach, and many other veggies into a vase of water before washing and cutting to rehydrate them.
It's the carbon dioxide that does the trick.
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