Salacious Salads

A salad doesn’t have to have the same four stock ingredients. Open your mind, and your feet will follow – out to the fields, the garden, the flowerpot

- By Debby Waldman

I’ll never forget the night I was introduced to Three Bean Salad. I was a teenager and I’m not sure what offended me more: the beans, or the idea that my mother thought she could trick me into believing that salad consisted of something other than iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes.

I never did warm up to it. I blame it on the beans, which were canned, a real turnoff. But when Mom started experimenting with lettuce-free salads that featured fresh ingredients, I was hooked. There was a pasta salad with zucchini fresh from a neighbour’s garden, and tabouli salad with bulgur that Mom mixed with parsley pulverized in the food processor.

My favourite was one of her simpler salads, cauliflower cut into bite-sized pieces, mixed with sliced radishes and green onions, held together with Hellman’s mayonnaise and a bit of salt and pepper. I haven’t craved iceberg lettuce since.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. As Calgary chef Scott Pohorelic says, the texture is brilliant. I’m not so sure I agree with his contention that it’s “awesome,” but I think he’s on target when he says the real problem with iceberg is it’s so “been there, done that.”

More Alberta chefs and market gardeners are spicing up their salads with ingredients you wouldn’t expect to find in the produce section of your local supermarket, but in a vase or even the compost pile. For instance, one of Pohorelic’s favourites: pea tendrils.

“You get them off the end of the vine, they’re tender and sweet and they taste just like peas,” he says enthusiastically. “A few years ago I went to visit my grandparents in Saskatchewan. I’d never cooked for them, and I went out to the garden and it was the end of the summer and there were no peas left, but the tendrils were perfect. I picked them and did a quick sauté with butter.”

Pohorelic also uses uncooked fava bean tendrils in salads. At Infuse Catering in Calgary, chef Wade Sirois uses lovage, a Mediterranean perennial with edible leaves and leafstalks, a favourite addition to salads, says Sirois. “It’s got a tangy, celery-lemon flavour,” he says. The plant grows so abundantly you’ll always have a fresh supply.

Sirois isn’t one to buck tradition completely, however. One of his favourite salads is a roasted vegetable medley. He’ll chop zucchini, peppers, carrots, eggplant, onions and mushrooms, toss them with balsamic vinegar, olive or canola oil, and salt and pepper, roast them and serve them topped with toasted pine nuts.

Some of Sirois’s salads are topped with toasted hemp or canola seeds, which aren’t always easy to come by. He gets his from local canola oil producers. The seeds add a tasty crunch, but for aesthetic value and taste, you’re increasingly likely to find flowers or flowering herbs in your salad.

Gwen Simpson, owner of Inspired Market Gardens in Carvel, near Edmonton, has a thing for borage, a herb with blue flowers. “You can eat both the leaves and the flowers, although the leaves are a little hairy,” she says. As a bonus, borage is easy to grow, and bees love it, creating what Simpson describes as “a wonderful, special honey.” The flowers and leaves taste a bit like nutty cucumbers.

Nasturtiums are increasingly popular because of their peppery taste and brightly coloured flowers. Both the leaves and flowers have quite a strong, sharp flavour. Children will love to tear off the end spike and suck out the sweet nectar. Simpson uses the fresh leaves and flowers in salads or she braises the leaves quickly as a peppery complement to fish.

Purslane, a garden plant also known as portulaca, contains Omega-3 fatty acids, which research has shown may lower the risk of heart disease. The leaves have a lemony flavour. “You bite into the leaves, and there are pockets of liquid in them,” says River Café owner Sal Howell. “It’s delicious. Nice and crunchy, and it has a great texture.”

Howell also uses chrysanthemum petals, violas, yellow marigolds and day lilies, which also have a lemony taste.

Carnation (any dianthus) and calendula petals are edible, and Simpson enjoys using them in salads as well. Whatever flowers you choose to eat, if they’re grown organically, cleaning is easy. “More than anything, you shake off the dust,” Simpson says. “Only wash them just before you’re using them. If I don’t wash the flowers, they’ll keep in a Tupperware container in the fridge for days, but if I wash them they’ll wilt quickly.”

That’s the reason you don’t see flowers in supermarket salads, she adds. The vegetables in supermarket salads have to be washed with a slight bleach solution, which is why they wilt so quickly. Wilted salads are a hard enough sell without being topped with something most of us associate with centerpieces or hungry goats.

It shouldn’t be that way, says Howell, who has served pickled nasturtium pods at her restaurant in Calgary’s Prince’s Island Park. Last year she offered her customers pansy sorbet in miniature ice cream cones.

“We grow edible flowers in containers around the restaurant, but it’s not like I’m going out and standing around the planter and picking these flowers and popping them into my mouth,” she says.

“On a plate with a salad of greens, there might be some petals or some whole flowers, scattered or garnished among them,” she explains. “They just add another dimension of flavour, and they’re so pretty. There’s something about having a beautiful plate of food that is stunningly arranged that makes you appreciate the colour and texture and bite of each thing.

You eat slower, and you have this moment with this exquisite plate and amazing nourishment around you.”  

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