Of salads and compost.

After all the meat of the past couple weeks, tonight I'm craving a big salad.


Aside from making cake mixes, salad making is where I started, with a small knife, standing on a stool helping my mother by chopping vegetables. She had enough to do trying to feed 12 people, so truthfully, by the time I was helping, a couple of the older siblings had likely moved away. But a big tossed/chopped was a mainstay of our dinner table.

Salad making is a lot like making soup. You root around in the fridge and pantry to see what can go into the bowl or pot. Tonights' offering is romaine, carrot ribbons, mushrooms, onion, yellow bell pepper, chick peas, celery, tomato and avocado. I'll add the tomatoes and avocado later so as not to make the salad too soggy now.

When making a salad there are always scraps. Some are OK for eating, others I do not want to.

I keep a "soup bucket" which is just a quart container from yogurt or cottage cheese in the freezer, so usable vegetable trimmings, left over rice or pasta for example, may be saved to make a soup in the future. When the bucket is full, I make soup. I don't like to throw food away so this works for me.

The material that is unsuitable goes into another bucket that ends up in the compost heap.

As I said the other day, we pay to have our trash hauled away. It doesn't make any sense to me to have it in a landfill when I, with a little patience, can improve the soil I am growing yet more vegetables in.

It keeps the circle intact, I don't have to pay to have it hauled away, and in the end it improves the soil. Conservation at every level!

Now about the dressing.....

Keep Digging!

As this post is pertinent to both blogs I am double posting.

My garden blog  http://amidwestgarden.blogspot.com/
My cooking blog  http://ihopeyouarehungry.blogspot.com/