salad, balance

A mesclun mix – a good mesclun mix – is a tricky thing to balance. To keep it interesting, special, worth the money, it needs to have something unusual, something you don’t find in Stop & Shop, a schtick. But you can’t go off the deep end either. Color, flavor, texture, size – they all have to balance, pretty in a bag and tasty on the tongue. As more and more growers get into salad, throwing all sorts of funky things in the mix, the search for something both appealing and original becomes more challenging.

I decided to do mild, with herbs. Another farmer in our area already does a spicy, mustard-heavy mix, which I love and probably couldn’t do better. So ours is mostly mitzuna, tatsoi, and pea shoots, with a little bit of purslane for crunch and purple basil for color. The size on the asian greens is imperfect, a little too big from the summer heat. But it’s pretty enough for people to pick up the bag and ask what’s inside, tasty enough for people to come back for another when they finish their first. I have no complaints.