Lettuce up the Wazoo

The last couple weeks have been busy and uninspiring, to say the least. I made some collard green chips, quesadillas and focaccia. Nothing was a disaster, but there were no rousing successes either. I do want to share some pictures of the products we’ve been getting. The first is of garlic scapes, and the others below are some of the beautiful greens we’ve gotten.

(Side Note: My fiance Chuck is a great photographer, and he gets credit for the fantastic food photos here. He’s also a great sous chef, and without him, I wouldn’t be half the chef I am. When I refer to “we” in my posts, it is his help I am referring to.)
After a weekend of camping, which is not conducive to cooking farm share goodies, I came home this afternoon to find that we have an overabundance of lettuce. In addition to what we got from the share, I also grow several kinds of lettuce. With all the rain we’ve been getting, it was screaming to be picked. Given this and knowing that there is much more coming our way on Tuesday, I decided that it’s time to get down to business: It’s salad time!

Tonight I followed a recipe from Cooking Light. I usually modify recipes, but we stuck pretty closely to this one. The only major change I made was to substitute bacon for prosciutto, which we don’t generally keep on hand. The arugula was all from my garden. Overall, it was a nice mix of the nutty, bitter arugula, the sweetness of the balsamic & honey drizzle, smoky sweet peaches and saltiness of the bacon. A lot for for the palette and brain to process.

After dinner I washed and packed up several heads of lettuce so be prepared for lots of salad recipes in my next post.