BELLOWS FALLS — It is May Day. The area's farm stands are opening up for the season, and soon we will begin the social ritual of gathering each week at the farmers' markets to share the unique foods, products, and music of our county.
After the long winter, we are looking for lighter foods, and if those foods are green, all the better.
As soon as the gardens offer lettuce and radishes, perhaps a few chives, we have the makings of a real salad, dressed lightly with a little vinaigrette. It's what we crave.
We welcome the month with a dance around the Maypole most years in our community - often in the soggy rain, but always with delight that spring is finally here! If we are lucky, we engage a local troupe of Morris Dancers as well to add to the festivities –– a party of ribbons and color and music.
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The food around our shared meal is a colorful celebration as well, using the best of this and last year's seasons of harvest, arranged and decorated to excite the appetite.
My Rainbow Ribbon Salad impersonates the beautiful, gayly colored ribbons of the Maypole and vibrant costumes of the Morris dancers.
The salad is composed of a variety of thinly peeled vegetables, and it is decorated with flowers and the first fiddlehead ferns. As soon as the ingredients come into season, we add local asparagus and make our dressing using the wild ramps with their bold garlic and leek flavor.
The Spring Pea and Mint Salad is as refreshing as it is beautiful, using mint to enhance the flavors of peas in all their forms, from shoots to full sugar snap pods.
Whatever the spring salad, it can be embellished with edible flowers from our gardens and farms! Look for wild or locally grown pansies, violets, wood sorrel, dandelion, forsythia, lilac, clover, and the striking lavender chive flowers. Use them sparingly; they are edible, but often not terribly palatable in large quantities.
If you miss the Morris dancers, put on your dancing shoes, turn up the music in your kitchen, and create something beautiful for dinner. Either of these salads can be made into a full meal with the addition of a protein of choice - perhaps grilled shrimp, chicken, or tofu.
Rainbow Ribbon Salad
This mostly raw ribbon salad is made with root vegetables from the previous season, enhanced with what is available from our local greenhouses and first crops.
Use what you can find, ingredients that are delicious and colorful or are interesting in texture, such as the local native fiddleheads. If the asparagus is available, welcome this much-anticipated addition.
Expand or contract this salad according to your needs and what you have available, but try to mix many colors.
I don't need to tell you how good this salad is for you, especially if you top it with the Green Spring Dressing.
Using a sharp vegetable peeler, make long ribbon slices of:
¶3 or 4 carrots of multi-colors
¶2 Chioggia (candy-striped) beets
¶1 large English cucumber
¶1 medium zucchini
¶1 medium yellow summer squash
¶{1/2} lb. asparagus (save the tips)
Core and thinly slice:
¶1 sweet red pepper
Mix all the vegetables and top with:
¶{1/4} lb. fiddlehead ferns, prepared (see below)
¶Reserved asparagus tips
¶4 or 5 radishes, mixed colors
¶Fresh edible flowers to garnish
Serve with Green Spring Dressing (recipe below) on the side.
To prepare fiddlehead ferns: If you do not properly prepare your fiddleheads, they will taste like weeds. Many people think they do not like them because they brought them home from the farm stand and cooked them without preparing them properly.
Properly prepared, fiddleheads are as delicious as asparagus and full of the nutrients our bodies crave at this time of year.
Rinse:
¶1 lb. fiddleheads
Soak them for 10 minutes, then gently rub off any brown papery covering. Drain. Repeat the soaking and draining.
Bring a large pot of water to the boil, add several tablespoons of salt, and add the fiddleheads.
Cook for around 3 minutes, or until the water is literally the color of a cup of tea. The color comes from the extraction of all the bitter tannin in the shoots. This step removes that bitterness.
Immediately remove the fiddleheads to a bowl of iced water. Drain. Now you can use them in a salad, soup, or sauté.
Green Spring Dressing
In a blender, combine:
¶1 packed cup of chopped ramps, cleaned, root ends trimmed off (you can substitute arugula, with 1 garlic clove)
¶{1/4} cup minced mint leaves
¶{1/3} cup apple cider vinegar
¶{1/2} cup extra virgin olive oil
¶Pinch each of salt and pepper
Process until smooth. Loosen with a little more olive oil to thin to the desired consistency if necessary.
Spring Pea and Mint Salad
Peas are delightful in late spring, but if the local varieties are not quite ready when you are ready to make the salad, frozen peas are always there. These are a staple of my freezer and one of the few vegetables that are nearly as good frozen as fresh.
My mother used to make a pea salad with just fresh English peas, mint from the garden, and a light vinaigrette. Simple, but so wonderful when the peas came in.
I've added both edible pod peas and fresh pea shoots, which are in season and available in many markets right now. The different textures of the variety of peas make this a lovely salad to behold, to enjoy, and to share.
Mint, ginger, and lemon are great companions, so I've used them all in this dish. These quantities are just estimates, so use what you can find or what you have on hand.
Steam just until crisp/tender:
¶2 cups or so sugar snap or snow peas
Immediately cool in iced water, drain, and set aside, then steam:
¶10 or 12 ounces of fresh shelled peas (you can substitute a thawed box of frozen peas)
Set aside.
Slice thinly:
¶1 bunch radishes, mixed colors if possible
On a large platter, make a bed of:
¶1 large bunch of pea shoots
¶1 small head butter lettuce
¶The greens from the radishes if in good condition
Assemble the salad. Sprinkle the peas and pea pods around the platter, then add the radishes. Garnish with:
• Fresh edible flowers
• Fresh mint leaves
• Fresh chives
Serve with Ginger and Lemon Vinaigrette (recipe follows).
Ginger and Lemon Vinaigrette
In a jar with a tight-fitting lid, such as a canning jar, combine:
¶The zest and juice (4 Tbsp.) of two lemons
¶1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
¶{1/2} cup extra virgin olive oil
¶1 Tbsp. fresh ginger, finely grated
¶1 generous tsp. Dijon mustard
¶Pinch of salt
¶ Few grinds of pepper
Shake vigorously until well blended.