Saturday, May 14, 2011

Salad for 500

The thought of preparing strawberry spinach-salad for 500 was daunting. Luckily I have people! Martha Stamps, chef extraordinaire, was consulted for a recipe for dressing that young tastes would welcome! Her husband, Shayne of Good food for Good People was able to find a flat of locally grown strawberries. The two of them gave me courage to believe that I could carry it off.

Garden helpers appeared at 12:00 noon the day before excited as usual to go outside in the garden. One of the young charges noticed the rather large knife I was carrying with me.
He recoiled, "That's dangerous." he pointed out. "Yes, it is, but it is the right tool for the job at hand." I said. As this weeks garden helpers strode out among the plants giddy with excitement, they learned some knife safety and proceeded to use the imposing tool to harvest the spinach. This brought me much stress as I reminded them at each moment how to carefully handle a knife. A hundred years ago the children would have probably been able to wield an axe by this age.

These children had no idea of how to handle a knife or use it to free the spinach from its stalk. They also had no idea how to gather the ripe berries. Things I grew up knowing without being taught through the example of my parents or grandparents, theses students had not experienced. They had to be taught to pick the ruby red strawberries and to remove the ripe ones without injuring those which had not yet matured.
They had to be encouraged to eat the fruit straight from the garden..."is it clean?" one asked. "We haven't used fertilizer or pesticides and it has been washed with rain water....do you think it is all right?" The answer was a red berry in a happy mouth!

We picked slightly more than two bushels of spinach -- but I confess we did not succeed in picking many berries, for most of those went into waiting mouths. One of the youngest students announced, "I do not like strawberries, but these are good. "Red-ripe strawberries sweetly warmed in the sun and delightfully juicy yielding to gentle pressure are different from those we buy in the store which have been engineered to be hard enough to ship, red enough to look ripe, but lacking in the real taste of a strawberry.

It was 12:30 before I got to bed last night. I had begun washing and tearing the spinach. I had bravely announced a SALAD DAY for Friday. But upon reflection, it was daunting. That is when your friends come in so handy... On Friday our gifted teacher, who had been displaced came early to help me cut the berries and two of the moms seeing that I could use extra hands stayed on to help toss and serve the salad......Salad for 500? Piece of cake with a little help from your friends!

Here is the recipe for the dressing -- it makes a quart - 2 cups oil, 1 cup red wine vinegar, 3 cloves of garlic chopped fine ( I used a garlic press) 1 teaspoon of salt, pepper to taste, and emulsified in a blender.

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