in our salad days

[lolaraincoat]

Tonight for dinner we ate a miraculously good salad, mostly from the garden. Here's the recipe, mostly for our reference in case we want to do it again.

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Wash, pick through and roughly chop a whole lot of tarragon (last year's tarragon has returned and is now completely out of hand, so required using up, but this barely made a dent in it) and smaller amount of chives (ditto) and parsley (see above.) You'll need about two cups once it's chopped.

Cut four skinned chicken breasts into smallish bite-sized pieces. Roll the pieces around in the herbs. Add six to eight chopped dried apricots (unless you have fresh available.) Sautee in a small amount of good olive oil until chicken is cooked through but tender. Drain.

Meanwhile, toast maybe half a cup or so of pine nuts. Toss together with the chicken.

Serve on top of a lot of greens - tonight was arugala, Boston lettuce, red lettuce, watercress, and spinach.

Plain cous-cous makes a good side dish.

This is enough dinner for three or four hungry adults.

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If we'd waited for the apricots to ripen, we could have gotten this entire meal but for the chicken, cous-cous and pine nuts from the garden. Oh, and the olive oil.

I guess if we got seriously into it we could press cooking oil from the grapeseeds that the grapevine provides in such quantity. And we could easily keep chickens in the garage, which would be great because then we wouldn't need to buy chickenshit from the garden center for fertilizer. Do pine nuts actually come from pines? because then we could just plant the right kind of pine tree out front (where the city has, in fact, promised that they're going to plant a linden for us this fall.)

Fresh tarragon this time of year is so powerful that it's hard to believe it's legal.

Comments

Iron Chef Jersey City

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I got my first CSA box, which includes "garlic scapes" which are sort of like garlic chives except they'll take your head off. Also radishes, some of which I ate in egg salad and some of which I'm going to cut up in yogurt cheese with those scapes. I bought a bunch of beets today and I'm going to use the greens and the radish greens in a cream soup with potatoes. And roast the beets as an appetizer before vegetable couscous.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Mmm, that sounds a bit like a salad I had on my recent Napa Valley trip. There were lots of bitter field greens with slices of fresh apricots, toasted almonds, and some sort of crumbly cheese, maybe feta, in a muscat vinaigrette. I think this is going to be a big year for apricots. I hope that bodes well for the peach crop, because peaches were teh suck for most of last summer. I have nectarines for lunch today!