The Cozy Cottage

Recipe: Garden Vegetable Salad

Usually, the recipes I feature here are my grandmother’s, ones that I have translated from her handwritten notes. After a spring and summer of growing vegetables and eating them, I thought it was time to share a simple recipe for how we take vegetables from the ground to our plates. My husband has dictated this recipe to me as he was too busy playing fetch with our dog to type it out himself. Here is his garden vegetable salad recipe.

Step 1: The first thing you have to do is take dirt and turn it into vegetables through the mysterious alchemy of gardening.

Step 2: Walk to your garden, preferably bare foot. Feel the cool blades of grass between your toes and the moist earth beneath your feet. Using your favorite pocketknife or gardening shears, delicately pluck from the sinuous limbs of your verdant plants the fruits they have prepared for you. Before leaving your garden, grab a single fistful of sensuous dirt, run it under your nose, and breath deeply the rich humus that is Mother Earth’s divine placenta. Of course, the vegetable selection is up to you. but in my case, I had a cucumber, a clutch of green beans, and numerous flamingo and purple peppers. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention the number of peppers. This is because the pepper plants in my garden are laden with fruit, a bounty that surely attests that god favors me. Lo indeed, the bows of my pepper plants are overburdened, stooped to the ground under ponderous weight, surely a sign of the blessing that I have received from on high.

Step 3: Cut up all those vegetables.

Step 4: Combine three parts olive oil, one part balsamic vinegar in a bowl. Add to this mixture, three spoonfuls of the brine from the pickled jalapeños that I’m sure you grew and pickled yourself and have available at all times. Salt and pepper to taste. Whisk together this mixture until it begins to emulsify.