Using Wild Leaves From Your Garden

Making the best salad does not mean you need to buy fancy and expensive ingredients. Making a nutritious salad does not mean necessarily mean buying organic produce. Making the best salad possible, in my opinion, is to use produce from your garden. The most obvious benefit of using your own home-grown leaves is that they will be fresh and the taste of the leaves will be so much more powerful. People who have only had, for example, store-bought arugula will not know how pronounced the peppery flavor is. For some, this might be overpowering, but for people who like arugula or rocket, this is a benefit and not a vice. Furthermore, you have access to leaves that you cannot buy in the store because they might wilt too quickly for them to be commercial produce. One such leafy green is the chickweed. Having a sweet and crisp taste, it has become a staple in my salads.

In this post, I will show you how I make a fried butternut and mock seed/nut praline salad, topped with aged balsamic vinegar and feta cheese (which you can swap with tofu to make this vegan).

Ingredients

I use three different types of leaves that I pick from my garden to use as the base for this salad:

• Wild rocket,
• Dandelion greens, and
• Chickweed greens.

As for the toppings, I have fallen in love with a combination of fried butternut, feta cheese (which you can swap with tofu), a quick or mock seed/nut praline, and aged balsamic vinegar. The ingredients are:

• Seeds/nuts,
• Sugar,
• Butternut,
• Coconut oil,
• Aged balsamic vinegar, and
• Feta cheese.

Building the Salad

This salad takes some time to make, from frying the butternut in the coconut oil to making the mock or quick praline. Speeding it up a bit is by placing the cooked components in the freezer. This should not deter you from making this salad! As these flavor components pair really well and it makes for a real flavor explosion. Begin by preparing and frying the butternut.

Fry the Butternut

Cube the butternut, the smaller the pieces the quicker they will cook, but also the more surface the more flavor. I have shared my method of cooking butternut in a previous post. But simply put, the smaller the pieces the more surface area there is to brown and caramelize. If you do this, the butternut becomes really sweet and also savory at the same time.

A Mock Seed/Nut Praline

The addition of some caramelized nuts/seeds takes this salad to a next level. Chop some nuts and seeds into smaller pieces, add them to a pan with some sugar. Keep a careful eye on it, as it can burn quickly. Use your nose to guide you. If you can smell the caramelized sugar, pull it from the heat, place everything on a dish and place it in the freezer to cool down.

(I mixed the sugar with the butternut. I did not have time to make it separately, so I added the nut/seed mixture and the sugar with the butternut and caramelized it with the butternut.)

To chill this quickly, place it in the freezer for 5-10 minutes.

Salad Layers and Butternut Toppings

Now it is time to make the salad. As a base, I use the wild rocket and dandelion leaves. These leaves have a bitter and peppery flavor. Breaking the leaves, instead of cutting, releases a better flavor in the leaves. This mimics mastication which releases compounds in the leaves to ward off animals from eating it. But this is the strong flavor we want.

Next, I add the caramelized butternut and seed/nut mix or mock praline. As this is chilled by now, the caramelized sugar has hardened. I can eat a whole bowl of just this mixture. The savory notes from the nuts/seeds and the burnt pieces of butternut contrast well with the sweet and caramelized sugar.

I then add the feta cheese for a salty element. It also helps with adding a creamy element to the dish. If you want to make this salad vegan, swap out the feta cheese with some vegan feta cheese.

Add the chickweed leaves now. They are tender and bruise easily. Handle them with care. They also have beautiful flowers, which adds a nice presentation element to the dish. Their flavor is sweet and crisp, but they are also nutritious and healthy! Bonus for an already healthy salad in my books.

I added some aged balsamic vinegar for a delicate acidic flavor. Unlike normal balsamic vinegar, the aged one has a more subtle flavor and pairs well with the other components. This is an optional step, but I think it greatly enhances the flavor of the other components. You only add a small amount. This is not to replace a salad dressing, as I think this salad does not require a salad dressing.

Enjoy!

Now you can enjoy a salad that you grew in your own garden. There are so many healthy and nutritious aspects to growing your own food, but I think one of the most overlooked aspects of it is that you get the opportunity to be outside and spend some time in nature and in the sun. I opted to enjoy this salad outside in the sun.