Since the lettuce is pretty much at its peak now, let’s take a look at each variety.

Forellenschluss. Most eye-catching lettuce of the season. Good flavor too; not much bitterness.

Grosse Brune Paresseuse. I like the texture of this one very much. It's inclined to be bitter, but just avoid the most mature leaves.

Red Iceberg. Very good flavor for an iceberg-type. Sweet and crunchy.

Hanson. Another iceberg type. Not quite as sweet as Red Iceberg, but very crunchy.

Tennis Ball. Grown at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, although you have to wonder whether after 200 years it's really the same thing. Anyway, a nice butterhead type. I'd grow it again.

Merveille des Quatre Saisons. I didn't like this one much. Supposed to be good for all year-round, but the flavor is just OK, tending toward bitterness. I have read descriptions of it as a butterhead type, but mine seems more like a romaine.

Now, about this week’s rain. See all the dirt on the lettuce? That’s actually shredded wood mulch. We got the most rain in the shortest time that we’ve ever had in the 5 years we’ve been here. Anything that was uphill went downhill. So I’m raking mulch back onto the paths where it belongs, and trying to wash it out of the lettuce.

But what did I make with all the lettuce this week? I made Vietnamese Summer Rolls again last weekend. I found the best varieties for this are the softer lettuces – Forellenschluss, immature Tennis Ball and Grosse Brune Paresseuse.

When I make a tossed salad, though, I like a bit of crispness. Hanson, Red Iceberg and mature Tennis Ball and Grosse Brune Paresseuse. We had Wendy’s Soba Salad (twice, in fact) with Hanson and Red Iceberg lettuces, but I changed the dressing a bit, and tossed in a few sliced radishes, sorrel leaves and garlic chives. Didn’t have any orange juice for the dressing, so mine was soy sauce, sugar, rice vinegar, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, Korean red pepper powder (mildly hot), and a little bit of lemon juice, with just enough peanut butter to thicken it to a creamy salad dressing consistency.

Any kind of lettuce is fine for sandwiches and wraps. We had salami and cheese sandwiches, topped with lettuce leaves and thinly sliced onion, and drizzled with a little chile olive oil. Radishes on the side.

And Friday I made something you could call a wrap or a taco or whatever, but it turned out well enough that I’ll give some details. I cut a boneless, skinless chicken breast into thin slices (across the grain), and sauteed it quickly with chopped onion and chopped green chile (last year’s Bulgarian Carrot, from the freezer) and salt to taste. I deglazed the pan with a small amount of water so the meat had a tiny bit of sauce with it. We topped it with lettuce, chopped onion, sliced radishes, cilantro and salsa (store-bought) and rolled it up in a roti softened in the toaster oven. A note about the rotis: I’ve lately been using these exclusively where I would previously use flour tortillas. The flavor is good and there are no dough conditioners or preservatives. I get them at the local Korean supermarket in northern Virginia or Indian grocery stores in Richmond.

(Nobody paid me, or even gave me free rotis, to mention their products.)

Peas 'Petit Pois Precoville'

I’m really hoping to be able to write about peas next week for the Garden-to-Table Challenge at Greenish Thumb , but if not, then it will probably be lettuce and radishes.

Assorted lettuce, including Forellenschluss

I think I’ve finally learned how to grow edible lettuce at Tangled Branches South. In the first years here, I dutifully sowed rows of seed directly in the garden because everybody knows that it isn’t worth the trouble to set out transplants of lettuce, right? Wrong! By the time the soil was warm enough to germinate the lettuce seed, the weather was about 2 days away from being hot enough to turn the seedlings bitter. The only good lettuce I ever grew here using direct sowing was fall-planted lettuce that I overwintered under row covers and harvested in the winter and spring.

So now I sow a few seeds in each cell of a cell-pack in late winter and place them in the cold frame. When they sprout, I thin them to one or two plants per cell. When they look like they’re big enough to survive in the garden, I harden them off for a few days and then transplant to the garden. I still keep them under row covers because: 1) I don’t trust the critters here to leave them alone, and 2) I think they need the shade.

We had ridiculously hot weather here in the last couple weeks (mid-upper 80s F) and I was afraid the lettuce may have gone bitter already, but I harvested a few leaves yesterday and they were mostly sweet.

A good basic tossed salad begins with a good basic vinaigrette. If  you Google vinaigrette recipes, you’ll get a zillion hits. Most of them are way too complicated and way too vinegary (for my taste). This is my way.

• Get some olive oil and some vinegar that taste good to you on their own. It’s very hard to make something tasty out of nasty ingredients.
• Put a small amount of vinegar in a bowl. This should be about 1/4 of the total amount you want to end up with, i.e. if you want 4 Tablespoons of vinaigrette, start with 1 Tablespoon of vinegar.
• Dissolve enough salt in the vinegar so it tastes rather salty. It’s going to be diluted when the olive oil is added.
• You can add a bit of mustard, either dry or prepared, to the vinegar if you want. It helps emulsify the vinegar in the oil. I sometimes add it and sometimes don’t.
• Add at least 3 times as much olive oil as vinegar. I usually add more than that.
• Whisk until the oil is emulsified.
• Taste to see if it needs more oil or more vinegar.
• Add freshly ground black pepper to taste and whisk again.

If you’ve planned ahead and made the vinaigrette in a large enough bowl, you can add your lettuce and other salad veggies to the same bowl and then – here’s the fun part – mix the lettuce and vinaigrette with your hands. It’s such a simple thing, but this technique ensures that each leaf is coated with dressing and isn’t bruised. Plus, you get to lick your fingers and olive oil is a good moisturizer for garden-rough hands. I can’t take credit for the idea – I got it from Alice Waters.

Lettuce, radishes, scallions in vinaigrette

My first sowing of small round radishes (Roodkapje, Easter Egg, and Philadelphia White Box) is ready to harvest now, and I’m still finding scallions from last year’s onions that I missed when digging them up last summer. Both those went into the salad along with the lettuce. I sowed six varieties of lettuce this spring – Forellenschluss, Red Iceberg, Hanson, Grosse Brune Paresseuse, Merveille des Quatre Saisions, and Tennis Ball. More thoughts on those later, especially heat tolerance.

This post is doing double-duty as a record of what we’re eating from the garden, and also my contribution to Wendy’s Garden-to-Table Challenge.

Zebra Swallowtail on Lavender

It was very fresh and very fluttery and appeared in the garden after a rainstorm yesterday. I only mention the rainstorm because it was so hot and steamy outside that the camera lens fogged up. Repeatedly. Fortunately, the butterfly stayed until the lens cleared.

There was a faint wash of pale blue on the upper side of the wings. You may have to click through to enlarge the picture enough to see it.

Notice the pale blue color close to the body.

I’ve noticed that all the swallowtails are besotted with the lavender this year. The variety is ‘Munstead’ from seed, if that makes any difference.

And I found another use for green garlic. Green garlic butter! I first made it as an accompaniment to homemade Camarones Brochettes, similar to those served in several local restaurants. I puréed green garlic (the whole stalk, roughly chopped) in a mini-blender and then added cold butter (and salt because the butter was unsalted) and whirled it just enough to combine. I think it would be great with any kind of seafood and I can verify that it’s delicious tossed with ravioli and coarsely ground black pepper.

Giant of Sicily, Shunkyo, Red Baron

I’ve made something similar many times since then, incorporating ideas from other sources and using whatever ingredients are at hand. Basically the idea is chopped radishes with a bit of something sour (lemon or lime juice, or vinegar, or sorrel) and salt and various other seasonings. The first three things (radishes, something sour and salt) are a constant, the rest is improvisation.

Spicy Sour Salty

A recent lunch version went like this. ‘Giant of Sicily’ and ‘Shunkyo Semi-Long’ radishes (coarsely chopped), a couple of ‘Red Baron’ scallions (sliced crosswise), a very few ‘Kentucky Colonel’ spearmint leaves (finely chopped along with the tiniest unblemished radish leaves), one ripe yellow ‘Lemon Drop’ chile pepper from the freezer (finely chopped), and lime juice and salt to taste. I think, as is, this would make a fine accompaniment for many types of  cuisines -Indian or Middle-Eastern or Latin American food come to mind – but you could adjust the variables to suit the rest of the meal. Don’t like hot peppers? Leave them out. Don’t like sour relish? Add a pinch of sugar. Don’t like mint? Try parsley. You get the idea.

Our red radishes need to be used up in the next few days. The round red ‘Giant of Sicily’ started to crack from the recent rain, and ‘Shunkyo Semi-Long’ have a very short harvest window between too small and too pithy. Soooooo, although I like my relish and can vary it quite a bit, I think  we may not want to eat it every day.

Here are a few more radish user-upper ideas from around the internet.

• Radish Pachadi. I’ve made this a few times and it’s delicious. If you’re not familiar with Indian cooking techniques, “crack the mustard seeds” means let them sizzle in hot oil until they start to pop.
• Radish Sandwich. Yolanda makes a very nice version, but I make it even simpler by just slicing radishes and eating them on buttered bread with a little salt. The bread has to be very good and very fresh for this. I’m thinking that you could turn this into a picnic buffet dish by making a compound butter of finely chopped radishes and, um, butter to spread on fresh bread or crackers.
• Along the same lines, is this Spring Radish Spread, based on cream cheese instead of butter.
• I haven’t tried this one, but it’s similar to my radish relish. There’s no recipe, just a description of something served at a taco place. Theirs has radishes, onions, tomatoes, and Habanero peppers. Also, see this version from the Rappahannock Cook & Gardener.

I started writing this post on Saturday morning and I’m finishing it on Sunday morning. We’re due for a week of hot weather. While browsing A Midwest Gardener’s Cookbook yesterday looking for more ideas, I found advice to pull the radishes when they’re ready and that, if the leaves are removed, they’ll keep well in the fridge. Better in the fridge than in the garden in this heat anyway. So yesterday, I pulled the remaining ‘Giant of Sicily’ and found all except the tiniest ones had split. I won’t be making radish roses out of those, but I think they’ll still be fine cleaned up and chopped up. The ‘Shunkyo Semi-Long’ radishes are faring better, but they do get pithy quickly, so I’ll be pulling most of those up too to put in the fridge. ‘Giant of Sicily’ was new to the garden this spring. It was OK, but nothing to rave about. It did seem to split very quickly. I think the catalog description said the roots would get to 2″ in diameter, but mine were much smaller than that. I may use up the seeds, but probably wouldn’t buy it again. On the other hand, ‘Shunkyo Semi-Long’ is a good radish. I’ve grown it for several years now. Some catalogs list ‘Shunkyo’, but I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing. It’s described as hot and sweet, but I can’t discern all that much of either. To me, it just has a good radishy flavor.

I have four varieties of daikon-type radish in the ground too, but they’re not quite ready yet. A topic for another post.