Thursday, July 3, 2008

Lettuce eat lettuce

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Just thought I'd post up a few snapshots from my parents' garden at their house in Bellerose, Queens. My folks have always been pretty eco-minded, so we collect rainwater for watering the plants and bury most of our organic garbage as compost. Over the decades we've planted lettuce, yam shoots, kōngxīncài, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, purple wax beans, chives, strawberries, and a bunch of other veg I can't remember.
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I went home a few weeks ago and encountered a bed of baby romaine...totally out of control. At my mom's direction I pulled up a huge pile of the greens in order to give breathing room to the tomato plants, but even when I was done it looked almost the same.
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Aside from making giant leafy salads from the romaine, I like slicing up the lettuce into ribbons and topping them with soba and soba's usual accoutrements. I also like using the big, flat leaves as a wrapper for grilled meat, Korean-style.
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These greens are super fresh, pesticide-free, and grown with love. Small wonder that occasionally I get a batch with a little "friend" still nibbling on them...sluglet, you can always have a leaf of my lettuce.

3 comments:

  1. The garden - that's so awesome and cool! Ok, girly me wants to know if you feel fine just washing the little slug off and eating the lettuce or if you then throw away that leaf.

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  2. Well I found him on the wet paper towel I had put around the lettuce, so I just washed the rest really thoroughly and ate it. I mean, chances are slugs have walked around most of it anyway before it was even picked. Ehehehehe.

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