I picked my first salad from the garden yesterday. The spinach was getting a little leggy, so the prunings got tossed in my bowl. Next came the sweet basil, a plant that was so loaded with heavy leaves that it was starting to droop. The lowest leaves of both kale plants were huge and crunchy. And the mesclun needed thinning, so I had little sprouts to sprinkle all over the top. It was delicious. It is so nice to sit down and eat a salad that actually tastes like something. I used about a teaspoon of homemade vinaigrette, but it was probably unnecessary. Really, it's no wonder that so many Americans need to pour gallons of ranch dressing onto their salads--otherwise they are completely tasteless. I always get angry when I hear people say that veg food is bland, but I guess it's true if you do all of your shopping at any major grocery store and never learn to use any herbs or spices. If your vegetables were picked 3 weeks ago and the only seasoning you use is salt, I can see why you would feel the need to add a load of fat to make them more palatable. I never wanted to eat my veggies as a child until we started growing them in the garden. I got back into the rut of pouring blue cheese dressing on everything in high school, and it wasn't until Mason and I started our little garden in Norman that I remembered that real vegetables taste like something. Now, I won't even look at tomatoes at the grocery store, but what if they were the only ones you'd ever had? The three most popular vegetables in America are potatoes (usually in the form of french fries), canned tomatoes and iceberg lettuce. If those, along with maybe canned corn and overcooked green beans, were the only vegetables that you had ever eaten, would you think that going vegetarian (let alone vegan) was an option? Would you think that even one meal without meat was an option?
