No-fuss Red-Leaf Salad with Sweet-and-Sour Dressing ideal for Easter lunch

The time had arrived for a parting with the last of our garden’s red-leaf lettuce crop. The enjoyment we’d derived from it left us wishing we’d planted far more than we had. Fresh-from-the-garden lettuce leaves tossed into a green salad has to represent one of the best parts of God’s creation.

MyRecipes.com gave us the pièce de résistance with which to bid our lettuce crop goodbye for 2011. Red-leaf lettuce tossed with green peas, slivered almonds, turkey bacon slices, and mozzarella cheese was swathed in a terrific sweet-and-sour dressing pulsed in the blender. I loved the fact that the dressing called for diced green onion—plucked from our garden rows, of course.

This one, which we enjoyed with meals last weekend, is destined to be a repeat performer on our Easter lunch table on Sunday. It’s an easy, newfangled take on the proverbial green salad. My mother used to call tossed salad combination salad (haven’t heard that term in decades), but Red-Leaf Lettuce with Sweet-and-Sour Dressing truly is, to borrow my mother’s phrase, a winning combination.

Red-Leaf Lettuce Salad with Sweet-and-Sour Dressing

1 bunch red-leaf lettuce, torn

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1/2 cup toasted slivered almonds

6 turkey bacon slices, cooked and crumbled

sweet-and-sour dressing (below)

Sweet-and-Sour Dressing

1/3 cup sugar (or sugar substitute)

2 1/2 tablespoons vinegar

1 tablespoon diced green onion

1/4 teaspoon salt (or salt substitute)

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup olive oil

In a large salad bowl combine salad ingredients. Into a blender container pour in all dressing ingredients. Pulse blender until all ingredients are well-blended. Toss, chill, and serve. Serves 6-8.

Mess o’ Greens Salad with Warm Pecan Dressing: a great way to bid farewell to our winter garden

Hubby says the secret with gardening is knowing when to roll ’em and knowing when to fold ’em. As far as the collard-green yield from our winter garden was concerned, the time definitely had arrived to fold ’em.

These delicious greens that practically were a foot-wide in some spots across the leaf were in their waning days. Leaves were on the verge of growing tough and yellow. The weekend that just passed seemed to be a good time to amass all those collards recipes that I blogged about uncovering on the Internet last week and to get to cookin’ while, as the advertisements go, supplies last.

My first task was to prepare Mess o’ Greens Salad with Warm Pecan Dressing, a delightful salad that used up an amazing amount of the collards plus some of our red-leaf lettuce that also has seen its glory days in our winter garden. (Recipe was from the Internet collection of www.nikibone,com, that I mentioned earlier.) Besides combining these two foods that we have been blessed with this season, the recipe also called for toasted pecans. As I’ve mentioned before, we have a big bucket of pecans in our freezer from the last time the dozen pecan trees on our property had their big output. This meant that all the key ingredients of this salad were home grown right here on our little spot of earth—just like our ancestors experienced in the olden days.

A simple dressing that combined balsamic vinegar, oil, and honey and was warmed on the stove was poured over the greens after toasted pecans fragrant from the oven were stirred into the vinegar mixture. The recipe says to serve warm; drizzling the dressing over the collards/red-lettuce wilted the greens slightly and made them tender for salad-eating.

Good things can’t last forever; the winter garden has to be cleared out to make way for the plantings of the spring and summer. We are thankful that some of those “good things” found their way to our table in the form of this wonderful new favorite.

Mess o’ Greens Salad with Warm Pecan Dressing

6 cups fresh collard greens, about 1 pound

6 cups other greens (mustard, turnip, red-leaf lettuce), about 1 pound

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 teaspoons honey

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup pecans, roughly chopped or broken, toasted

Wash greens well, dry thoroughly, then remove and discard the long stems. Tear the greens into salad-sized pieces and place in a large bowl. In a small bowl combine the vinegar, honey, and mustard. Set aside. In a small skillet heat the oil until hot but not smoking. Add the vinegar mixture and pecans and cook; stir regularly, for 2 to 3 minutes. Pour over the greens; serve at once. Makes 4-6 servings.