Creative Greens

I like making salads from a large variety of greens: lettuces, chicories, herbs, all kinds of things. So I'm always happy to find new greens at the market for my salads.

In this photo, you see at the top red-stemmed dandelions and below that, radicchetta, the one that is similar to oak leaf lettuce. Dandelions are fairly bitter so I only use the small leaves raw in salads. The larger leaves I blanch and then sauté with olive oil and garlic, or I add them to braises of mixed greens. Radicchetta is a new green to me. Being a chicory, it has a little bitter note, but it is also nutty enough to be eaten out of hand. I can see it doing really well on a tomato and goat cheese sandwich. Both of these are from Mark Bishop at Master's Touch, Berkeley Springs, WV.