i am afraid that will be impossible

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This post will eventually be about salad.

The summer I was sixteen, I met a boy.  He was a hilarious boy, but despite his fundamental belief in kidding around almost constantly, it was clear to everyone that he was at his core a gentleman--not a quality that is often readily observed in sixteen year old boys, much as we all love them.  When the summer was over, he went back to Canada and we stayed in periodic touch for the years and years that came after.  This meant periodically receiving a letter from him written on toilet paper, or a prank phone call saying he was at the airport near my house.  Sometimes we kept up, and sometimes the interval between contacts was kind of long.  After my kiddos were born we fell out of touch for quite a while.

When I tracked him down a few years ago I found out that he had gotten married and had a beautiful baby girl, and also that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.  When we reconnected that time, he resumed his practice of sending me periodic, hilarious emails peppered with his insanely accurate memories of very silly things he had been told years before.  Incriminating things I had done as a toddler and ridiculous phobias I had long outgrown were trapped securely in his nimble brain.  He was famous for it, he said.  I can't repeat here the story he had on his cousin Cindy, for example, but rest assured she wishes fervently it had been lost to history and not, instead, dredged up at every family gathering since she was four.

The normal progression of this disease is very rapid.  Half of patients die within three years of diagnosis.  But Richard wasn't one of those patients.  He lived, by which I mean not only that he survived, but that he LIVED.  Have you seen that poster that says "carpe the hell out of this diem"?  That was him, by all accounts: swimming (even though he could not use his arms, or much of his lungs) and playing hockey (he was Canadian, after all) and biking and staying in touch with people he knew all over the place and most of all enjoying his beautiful wife and their little girl.  He was the most positive person you can possibly imagine.  And he also was driven to change the landscape for people with his disease.  He raised thousand and thousands and thousands of dollars toward finding a cure, mainly (as near as I can tell) by being cheerful and funny and exemplary.  

Richard lived seven years after his diagnosis.  Last April, it seemed to me it had been a while since we had exchanged emails, and I had a funny feeling, and thanks to the Internet it became clear that Richard had died a few days earlier.  I went to pick my kiddos up that afternoon, and when I turned to say hello to my older daughter as she got in the car, I saw that she was wearing a pair of earrings I had never seen her wear before, and that they were the black coral earrings that Richard had given me for my 16^th birthday.  My daughter is 16, of course.  This made a kind of senseless sense.

Richard’s wife Richelle is leading his annual hike for ALS this year, and yesterday, in her rabble-rousing email to Richard’s network, I read this:

He would start thinking of ideas for his website months in advance and would spend days and days setting it up. And he was so grateful for everyone's support that he would send personal thank-you emails to every single donor.  All of this would be done one key at a time with his toe.

I began yesterday feeling pretty downtrodden by all the things I needed to get done, and ill-equipped to do most of them, and generally burdened.

I concluded yesterday willing to concede that I have not been very good about counting (using my fingers, and the full breath in my lungs) my many blessings.

This in no way prepares us to talk about salad, except in the sense that the kale is at is peak, now that cooler nights are upon us, and the lettuce is still tender and good, since we still have sunny, warm days.  The tomatoes will never be any sweeter than they are right at this moment.  There’s a lemon or two left from my last care package.  As far as this salad goes, now is the time.

I bet you could use any old kind of miso, though certainly the smoother the better.  The dashi miso that my dear brother in law gave me has a pungent smokiness that is extra delicious, and you can get it at any Asian grocery.  Ditto the yuzu juice, which is also not essential--lemon juice alone is fine--but which kicks it all up a notch or two.  

I would love to show you a picture of the salad, but we keep eating it after the sun sets.

carpe diem salad

1 heart of romaine, coarsely chopped

1 head of bibb or boston lettuce, mainly the tender inner leaves, torn

1 firm-ripe avocado, cubed

5-6 leaves of Russian kale, finely shredded

1 perfect tomato, cored and coarsely chopped

2T dashi miso paste

1T yuzu juice

juice of half a lemon

¼ c EV olive oil

pinch of cayenne pepper, if that appeals

Combine the vegetables in a large salad bowl. Thin the miso paste with the juices, and then whisk in the olive oil and the pepper. Toss thoroughly and eat, with gusto, immediately.  No time like the present.

new day

There are a few reasons to be grateful today.  Actually, there are dozens and dozens.  Here are three four:

1. The Miracle Chicken, who survived being pecked for all intents and purposes pretty much right to death, as I told you, and then dodged The Hand Of Chicken Death that claimed her bunkmates and three other chickens in one dreadful week of random and distressing poultry management misery that I kept secret from you, and was presumed Taken From Above yesterday by the circling hawks, has materialized yet again.  Though unnaccounted for at roll call last night, there she was this morning all "where's my breakfast?"  She continues, at least for today, not to be dead. This is a specialty of hers, thus far.

2. When I said, honestly but also, in truth, kind of reflexively, "Thanks so much," to the young man with special needs who does the bagging at the grocery store this morning, he said, very thoughtfully, "You are welcome so much."  I became, instantly, way more thankful than I had been a moment earlier, and a little more alert to the nice ways we can connect to other humans as we go about the day.

3. At least 10 of you are battling Ryan Gosling with me.  There is still time to leave your name to win a jar of jam and save us all from my searches to see what other food groups have been rendered into effigies.

4. The corn and the tomatoes are rolling in, so it is time to make my go-to summer potluck salad.  I don't make it every single day in August like I used to, because barley of course had to go and have gluten, and sometimes I make it with quinoa, which is also really fine, but nothing beats it with barley.  Nubby and chewy and satisfying.  Or so I recall.  It is a snap to make and loves parties.  (If you don't feel up to cooking the corn, or have more nectarines than tomatoes, make Alana's salad.).

corn, barley & tomato salad

1 c raw pearled barley

4-6 ears of corn, shucked

about 2 large tomatoes, any color

a large handful of fresh basil, chopped

1/2 c olive oil

2 T balsamic vinegar

fresh ground pepper and coarse sea salt, to taste

Cook the barley in lightly salted water until tender, about 30 minutes, and drain.  Cool (you can rinse it to make this happen faster).

Cook the corn, cool, and slice from the cob. (This is also a fine use for leftover cooked corn, if that ever happens to you). Slicing slowly is the key to not filling your kitchen with corn asteroids.  It usually takes me a cob or two to remember this.

Chop the tomatoes into a chunky dice.

Combine the corn, barley, tomatoes and basil in a large bowl.  Season with the oil, vinegar, salt & pepper; taste and adjust as you like it.  Err on the side of a little extra salt and vinegar, as the flavors mellow out as it stands. 

love wednesday

 

The first thing that happened this morning was that a dove perched on the window by the head of my bed and did some cooing.  This sounds like a lovely way to wake up.  Sounds can be deceiving, or more accurately in this case, sounds can be profoundly irritating and make you wonder if some doves are not as capable of higher cognitive processing as other doves.  Scratch, thud, rustle: now scrabbling to get a comfortable foothold on the window above the bed, now thumping (headfirst, it sounds like, maybe?) inelegantly into the siding over by the door.  Now back to the window!  Coo, coo, coo!  Now I am flying off...back again!  Again with the coo, coo, coo!  Are you up?  It's your mid-week bonus day to sleep in--just came to tell ya!  Coo!

So I was ready indeed to recalibrate the morning, and the little note from my boy did just that.  I asked him what he wanted for breakfast, and without hesitation he told me "a milkshake and salad."  Those sounds are not deceiving to me--those are the sounds of a small body knowing just what it is after to grow on.  I had just read this post about a chopped and restorative salad when he said that.  Given what was in the larder, it became finely chopped celery, fennel, tender young zucchini, cucumber, parsley, basil and romaine lettuce, tossed up with a spoonful of capers, the juice of half a lemon, some crumbled feta, good olive oil and a twist or three of pepper.  This took about three minutes.

To play the part of the milkshake, I threw frozen strawberries, a handful of the blueberries we picked yesterday, some yogurt, some coconut water, some almonds and a splash of strawberry elixir (I made a second batch of that, by the way, using chopped up lemons in place of the now-vanished kumquats, and adding a pinch of crushed red chiles--oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah baby--but honey could have done the trick just as well) into the blender.

It all seemed to hit the desired spot.

Hope your day is full of peace and progress and satisfyingly salty salads.

pits stop

Strawberries still elude us, and the clock is ticking.  But we did make it to PYO cherries this week: fifteen pounds of delight.  I become a little driven, let's say, in the presence of fruit-laden trees, but because it was scorchingly, broilingly, miserably hot and there were children in the picking party, I had to stop.  Though it sounds sad, in fact this turn of events was fortunate, because the cherry pitter we were using turned out to be fatally flawed and we did not discover this troubling detail until after the local cherry-pitter emporium had shuttered for the evening and we were in a stare-down with the buckets of cherries.  My younger daughter was trying to operate the pitter as I made a quick, salty, cold dinner to restore us after the hot day.  She was muttering and swearing and slamming things around, and making a hell of a mess in the process.  I said soothing things.  She grumbled and huffed in fitful exasperation.  Cherry debris became airborne.  More invectives were uttered.  Now that's enough, I said.  It's a cherry pitter.  Relax.  (Hold that thought a sec, dear reader.)

In another fortunate development, my West Coast Fruit Angel took it into her head, as she often does, to make sure we were not suffering from scurvy here in the East.  She loaded up some USPS cartons with a healthy portion of the citrus that flows as water from pipes in her yard.  This box of magnificence awaited us here when we rolled in with the cherries:

and I am here to report that apple cider over a ton of ice with crushed mint and mashed kumquats is a powerful restorative.  The working title for this cocktail is the Flat Rate Love.

After the cold supper (and more on that in a moment), I took my turn at the cherry pitting.  WHAT a piece of JUNK that "pitter" was--miserable, non-functional crap.  Pure torture to use. Cherry PULVERIZER, more like it.  Fricking cherry juice EV AH REE WHERE.  In my eye.  On my clothing.  Pits and cherries flying like shrapnel all over the kitchen.  "Mama," said my daughter.... But we persevered, and after swaggering to the freezer under the twin weights of our loot and our tremendous self-satisfaction, we swabbed the decks.  Clean as a whistle.

This morning, my older daughter came downstairs kitted out for ballet (to which she was en route), sat down to her bowl of cereal at the counter, and came away with a neat blotch of cherry juice on the one pair of clean ballet tights she owns. It seems it had escaped the clean-up efforts and over-nighted under the countertop. Which reminds me to tell you, if you don't already know, that boiling water, poured through the fabric from a good 8" up, erases fruit juice like magic.  And that wet tights worn in hot weather are cooling.  And also, though it is not related to this twist, that cherry pit water is almost as nice as strawberry hull water, and is prepared by the same laissez-faire technique.

There will be a cherry clafoutis later on today, and on Monday I'll fill you in on how that turns out.  Meanwhile, about that cold supper.  It's kind of like Thai summer rolls without the rolling, and it goes a little something like this:

cold supper for hot nights

1 # tender asian noodles of any type that amuses you (we used cellophane noodles last night, but have used lo mein and soba and various types of rice noodle in the past)

1 block seasoned tofu*, cut into strips 

AND/OR

a nice pile of grilled or broiled chicken, fish, steak or other cooked meat that lurks in your larder

A large pile of greens (chard, spinach, tender kale), chopped

1 tomato, thinly sliced

1 recipe of the following dressing:

1/4 c each finely chopped fresh basil, mint and cilantro

1/4 c fresh lime juice

1/4 c thai fish sauce
2T rice vinegar

2t grated fresh ginger (or more, to taste)

a handful of finely chopped chives or scallions

1 tsp chili paste (less or more, to taste)

1T vegetable oil

1t sucanat or brown sugar (entirely optional but it does balance things nicely)

Cook the noodles until tender and drain, then rinse with cool water and toss with a splash of neutral oil until not sticky.  Set aside.

Blanch the greens until tender, refresh in cold water and drain thoroughly. Also set aside.

To assemble:  Each dish gets a wad of noodles, topped to one side with a small pile of greens, next to a little colony of tomato pieces, next to a few strips of tofu, next to a portion of the other protein.  Pass the sauce.

* you can buy seasoned tofu wherever fine tofus are sold, or you can take a block of firm tofu, cut it into little 2" x 2" x 1/2"squares, oil it lightly and season it with some salt and pepper, and bake it on a parchment-lined sheet at 425 or so until it is crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, like an igloo. (I am pleased to report that I can't post a link to that cartoon, but polar bears are involved.)

salad daze

A hundred years ago when I lived in New York City, there was a French-Japanese restaurant in sort of the Murray Hill area that was stupendously delicious, marrying two detail-minded cuisines with some nice balance that brought out the best in each one.  This was before Fusion Cuisine was big news all over, and long before it passed from cutting-edge to its present state of horrific overuse.  I can amuse myself for hours (Food Nerd over-share!) inventing or merely cataloging foods I categorize as Confusion Cuisine.  It's an excellent distraction if you are stuck in an airport somewhere, both because you will be bored and because you will see a higher proportion of examples roaming all around you.  Airport food courts are a rich natural habitat for Confusion Cuisine.  Think Wasabi Hummus on a Parmesan-Sundried Tomato Wrap with Feta. Think Cajun Shrimp Alfredo with Pita.  Think Grilled Chicken Breast with Kung Pao glaze and Pineapple Pico de Gallo. 

But borrowing a little here and a little there can work out, if a light hand and steady eye on digestibility are brought to bear.

If I had eaten this alone, I might have wondered if it was worth telling you about.  But wrestling over the bowl was observed at the table.  Maybe families all share a skewed tastebud. Let me know.

food-court-here-we-come tomato salad

handful of dried wakame seaweed

1 cucumber, peeled and seeded (if the seeds are large) and coarsely chopped

2 tomatoes, coarsely chopped

large handful of basil leaves, chopped

dash (or more) of sriracha chili sauce

3t (or to taste) tamari or soy sauce

1T EV olive oil

dash toasted sesame oil

squeeze of lemon or dash of rice vinegar

Soak the wakame in cool water to rehydrate; drain, pressing excess water out.  Toss everything together and taste to adjust seasoning to your liking.  Improves with ten minutes or so of resting time, which will mellow things a bit.  This is also true of people.

bean there

After yesterday’s detour into the flour bin, we’re back to the whole chickpea today. I am bound and determined to find one way to make everyone try them, which may explain the drop in readership. Friday, there will be cake. But only if you have finished your chickpeas.

This may be another one of those things you have to make without telling yourself or anyone around you what is in it. Like the parsnip oven fries, it sounds like love beads and macramé wall hangings will come in to play. Also like the parsnip oven fries, I will try to distract you for a minute by yakking about how good for you this will be--perhaps misguidedly, because I should just tell you it’s tasty. Then, perhaps, (like the effect I’ve enjoyed recently with the parsnip oven fries) I will begin to be lovingly accosted in public places by beautiful, fresh-faced children who happily ate the thing and want to smile at me because I told their mother to make it for them.

So, quickly: arame is a kind of seaweed, but it is not slimy and it does not taste like it was stuck to the bottom of your kayak. It brings you astonishing levels of calcium, iron and trace minerals, plus elusive vitamins and immune-, libido- and joint health-supporting effects that you would be hard-pressed to find on the resumé of other things in your grocery cart.

Plus: we are going to douse it, and the chickpeas it rides in on, with lots of that irresistible triple threat of lemon, olive oil and salt. It’s a flexible set-up, in that you can leave it at that, or continue gilding the lily with a bunch of optional accessory ingredients.

Arame is, like most of its weedy brethren, available on most Asian aisles of the Gourmet Shoppe and/or Wheatberry Emporium type of establishment near you, as well as in any Asian market worth its salt. It looks like the wiring of some motorized vehicle left too long in a damp garage full of mice, but after a quick soak is less unfriendly in appearance. The soaking water is a boon to any houseplants you may have, so give them a treat while you are at it by throwing it into your watering can.

chickpea & arame salad

serves 4-6

One good size handful of arame

2 c cooked chickpeas, drained (if canned, then rinse them)

juice of a lemon

¼ c really good olive oil

½ t cumin

a pinch to 1/8 t cayenne

1/2 to 1 t sea salt, or to taste

large handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

optionally:

1 t finely grated fresh ginger

1 clove garlic, mashed or minced

1-2 scallions, white and light parts only, minced

handful of green beans, blanched and cooled and cut into 1-2” sections

Soak the arame in water for ten minutes or so, and then drain it well, pressing excess water out.

In a medium size bowl, lightly mash some or all of the chickpeas. You can skip this step, but it does help the little fellas absorb more of the flavor. Now combine with the remaining ingredients--the seaweed and the seasonings--and taste to adjust the flavors to your liking. It likes to sit a little before you eat it, but if it will be longer than about a half hour you may want to wait to add the parsley. A long time in that much lemon juice will diminish its beautiful green. If you have let it sit, taste again before you serve as a little booster shot of lemon juice and salt is often desirable at that point.

salad daze

wishful thinking. all we have now is rain and mud.

My mother has a belief that people in cold climates should not eat salad in the winter. Tender greens are not a natural part of our winter ecosystem, goes her reasoning, and so we are not meant to eat them.

She may have a point, but I find it hard to stick to this as a rule of thumb. For one thing, I get a little wonky when I go too long without a salad. For another, the minors in my care are big salad eaters, to such a degree that our middle child has a Salad Ranking System--“ooh, fennel salad! That’s my fourth-favorite!” I find it hard to say “no” to a child who is begging for salad, even if it means buying lettuce that has a frequent-flier number.

A friend brought a version of this one to a potluck, and the standings were immediately re-shuffled to accommodate it. I am not a fan of cold grain salads, but this one avoids the chalk and sog that turn me off by flipping the proportions around; grains are an accent rather than the base. A power salad is a pretty free-form experience, so this is an approach more than a recipe. Our favorites are noted but it’s a good place to go wild and make it your own.

Start with washed greens sufficient to feed your crowd. In the winter, where garden-fresh leafy greens are not in plentiful supply, Romaine lettuce turns up in the bowl pretty frequently. Its sturdiness makes a great base that stands up well to additions, but add baby spinach or arugula, torn red-leaf or boston lettuce or anything else looking brightly back at you from the produce shelf. Chopped steamed broccoli can be another great addition in months when leafy greens choices are slim.

For a salad to feed 6, toss about ½ c of cooked, cooled quinoa (my favorite), cracked wheat (if gluten is not an issue) or any other cooked, nutty whole grain on top of the greens.

Sprinkle on about half a cup of finely crumbled feta or goat cheese, or choose chopped green olives or capers if you are going dairy-free, or try both, along with the same amount of coarsely chopped roasted nuts, like almonds or pine nuts or pecans.

Now add about ¾ c of chopped fresh fruit. The top pick in our house is a sectioned and de-membraned orange (try a cara cara if you haven’t before) or grapefruit, but a mango would work well, too. Add a chopped avocado if they are looking good when you shop. There's a lot of whining around here when I don't use an avocado.

Dressing this salad is a pretty simple matter, as there is so much going on that little is required. A glug of good olive oil (maybe a dash of flax oil, while you are at it), the fresh juice of half a lemon or lime and a twist of pepper usually do it; a sprinkle of coarse salt or a dash of tamari may be desirable for balance if there is not enough salt in your chosen add-ons.

bandwagon

I had to lay off the Brussels sprouts for a while, but I have just fallen off the wagon. I entered rehab after a love affair with oven-roasted Brussels sprouts led to run of these Brussels sprouts, which are delicious, and from there it was a short slide to a spate of these Brussels sprouts, which you can make with bacon instead and which are insanely addictive, or at least they are to me, and I was all set to embark on these Brussels sprouts when the family staged an intervention, and I cooled it for a while.

But during my Vegetable Week quest, I ran across a recipe for Brussels sprouts in coconut milk, and that sounded pretty good, and I was home alone. As soon as the coconut milk hit the sprouts, though, I knew I had been steered wrong. The reason the other sprouts were so damn tasty was that they are flash-cooked in a little fat, and you get a caramelizing effect on the edges with a bright flavor elsewhere. If you groaned at the mere mention of one of these dollhouse-size cabbages, it is likely because you have been subjected to the odor, flavor and texture of a Brussels sprout cooked in liquid. Let’s just pretend this is a whole new vegetable, because that is what it tastes like.

Furthermore, fast cooking preserves the stupendous nutrient value of the sprout, which is high in sulforaphane, believed to have potent anticancer properties, and indole-3-carbinol, which is reported to block the growth of cancer cells. Who doesn't need a little of that action in their day?

But mainly they are tasty, and in my experience tastiness leads to eating, and this week we are all about eating our vegetables so this is all to the good.

If you have a food processor, it is the work of a moment to shred the little buggers using the slicing disk (be sure to trim the woody end off and peel off the outer leaves first). If you don’t, and I fall into the latter camp, it’s the work of several moments to just slice them up not particularly carefully. My friend Julie gave me a swanky new knife, which made short and pleasant work of the slicing. Incidentally, my friend from Grenada says if you set your knife down and it happens to balance blade-up, it means someone is going on a trip. My knife did, and then my dad called to ask if we wanted to go on vacation with them, so you can see that vegetables are VERY POWERFUL INDEED.

stir-fried Brussels sprouts with coconut, chile & lime

About a pound of Brussels sprouts

2-3 T unsweetened shredded coconut

2-3 T vegetable oil

1-2 cloves garlic, minced or chopped

a fat pinch of coarse salt

a fat pinch of dried red pepper flakes

to serve:

a wedge of lime

Trim and whack up the sprouts, by hand or machine. Have a serving dish ready near the stove. Heat a medium heavy skillet over medium heat and put the coconut into it. Stir and toss for a moment or two, until the coconut is lightly toasted. (This is not a good time to space out and wander off, as I am telling you that a few moments is all that stands between you and burned coconut). Immediately remove the coconut to the dish. Now heat the oil in the pan for a moment, and toss in the remaining ingredients, Stir well to combine and fry until the sprouts are lightly browned in places and bright green and tender-cooked throughout. This takes about 3 minutes.

Turn off the heat, toss the coconut in and stir it around, and then remove it all to the serving dish and squeeze the lime on top. Serve immediately as a hot side, or room temperature as a salad.

winter greens

There is an email that makes its way around as such things do, on a certain cycle, that may or may not have originated with an actual contest in the Washington Post years ago. Do you know the one I mean? The challenge in that mythical contest was to create a new word by changing one letter of an existing one, and the list is one of the few seasonal emails I am generally happy to see, because it has some great words on it. As will happen in the Great Age of Computers, some enterprising soul who was tired of the same email coming around announcing a contest that wasn’t happening anymore, if it ever did, revived the thing. I have just wasted ten minutes I will never get back choosing (in my entirely objective opinion) the best of the words in this year’s contest. I present them to you so you can immediately begin using them. No need to thank me for saving you the trouble of culling the list yourself, and if you prefer to waste your own time directly, the full list can be found here.

automagically - a thing that just happens mysteriously

carcolepsy - the chronic inability to stay awake while riding in a car

eblaborate - oversharing at length and with no clear thesis

jobstacle - when work gets in the way

pregret - Regretting something that you haven’t done yet

All good ones, right? But the ultimate winner, I feel, is this one:

crapacity - Upper limit to the amount of BS you can tolerate

Perhaps you have reached yours, so let’s talk about bitter vegetables. Family legend has it that when I was served an endive at a tender age I did not find it pleasant. I began to refer to anything too bitter to enjoy as “derve,” and that word has persisted in my family’s lexicon ever since. It’s a good word, I think, perhaps not on the order of “jobstacle,” but one I continue to use for things that are too bitter to be palatable.

Very few vegetables these days get the diagnosis, though. I love endive and radicchio and dandelion, and even the most casual research will tell you these are definitely vegetables that will love you back: they are high in minerals and immune-boosting antioxidants, and stimulate your liver to be a better sanitation device.

But that’s worthless data if you can’t make them tasty enough to eat. My favorite way to eat broccoli rabe has always been to blanch it in salted water, then sauté it with garlic and olive oil and and lots of salt. If the very bitterness of this common Italian restaurant treatment has put you off it before, though, fly in the face of your pregret and try eating it raw.

My friends Naomi and Ron served this salad at one of their periodic, epic potluck dinners, and I have been making it ever since. This amused Naomi when I told her, because she forgot she ever made it at all. She is the Queen of Greens, and it is probably hard to keep all her incredible salads straight. Contrary to what you might expect if you have gone to lengths to cook its bitterness away, raw rabe is much sweeter. And the salty-sour dressing makes it go down nice and easy.

broccoli rabe salad with pesto and lemon

1 head broccoli rabe

about half a cup of prepared pesto

the juice of at least one lemon

coarse salt to taste

Trim the woody ends from the broccoli rabe stalks and tear/chop the tender upper parts into bite-size pieces. The leaves and little florets are of much more use here than the thicker parts of the stems. Wash and thoroughly dry. Mix or shake the pesto, lemon juice, and a perhaps a little extra olive oil, depending on how thick the pesto you have is, in a little jar or dish and pour this over the greens, along witha good pinch of coarse salt, tossing or mixing with your hands until everything is well-coated. Pesto can vary quite a bit, so taste for the right balance of sour, salty and pesto-y, and correct accordingly with more of whatever you require.