Doesn't Make Me an Aggie, Does It?

My bookclub discussed Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle this evening. I'm about 1/4 of the way through it. To attone for this transgression (though I was not the only one) I planned to bring a salad to share with my clubmates, many of whom I hadn't seen in almost two years, since that was the last time I went because Sunday softball frequently interfered, as did my lack of book reading. For no particular reason, the club tries to tie the dinner menu to some theme in the book, and since this book is about food and actually has recipes it wasn't too big of a stretch. The book is essentially a journal of the year the author and her family spent trying to live "deliberately" (an abverb stolen from Thoreau but appropriately so) and in harmony with the natural food cycles of their Virigina farming community. So I decided to try to get all the ingredients from my made-up salad locally. Predictably, I decided this about two hours before the book club meeting, so my sources were limited... my backyard and the HEB Pantry. I actually had decent success.

For the lettuce I was able to harvest some of the surprisingly robust romaine and basil crops in my garden. The tomatoes are still green, and the snails got my broccoli, so that was all I could muster, but I felt quite smug and show-offish. I also put together an herb bouquet (again, mostly to show off) of oregano, cilantro, sage, rosemary, thyme, and mint.

Off to the HEB, I had no idea what else would follow "the rules" of trying to put together a seasonally and locally available salad. It was surprisingly easy - it's Texas citrus season, and the HEB was lousy with tangerines, grapefruits, and oranges. The Rio Star small grapefruits were so fabulous, in fact, that my husband gnawed the sweet leftovers off the rind once I'd cubed the fruit for my salad. I did have one small knife accident (I get a little rambunctious with the blade sometimes) and can confirm that citrus juice in an open wound is not cool. So I had the vegetable and the fruit covered for the sald - now I just needed a little protein to kick things up. Again, the HEB delivered - walnuts from San Antonio and queso fresco from right here in Houston. (Side note on the queso fresco - always buy the kind made with pasteurized milk because apparently there are a lot of, um, issues my research doctor friends see with the truly fresco varieties.) I tossed it all with olive oil (the only thing not local) and voila!