My favorite tool of the spring salad season is my salad spinner. I’m not usually one for corporate sponsorship, but I have to say that my spinner is OXO brand, and I love it.
Growing up, my mom was a salad master. She would go through the tedious process of washing it, drying it with paper towels, chopping, and then tossing it with other exciting ingredients. Oh, how I took those salads for granted!
When I went out on my own, I quickly decided that salads were too much work for the number of food units produced, and stopped eating leafy green salads. There were easier ways to eat veggies!
But now that I grow a lot of food, salad is back in my life in a big way. There are a number of characteristics that make this the case. Leafy greens are easy to grow. You can grow them when there is little else to eat (April and May). You can easily plant way, way more than you can eat – even if you are a beginner gardener. Especially if you are a beginner gardener! Lettuce and other greens don’t keep well (you can’t just leave them in the fridge for weeks), and there are few ways to process them. So if you grow them, you need to eat them promptly.
Enter Salad Spinner to save the day! Since it’s saved my day, I thought I would share – maybe it can save yours too. I have gotten this task down to literally 10 minutes. The spinner consists of 4 parts: bowl, colander (fits inside bowl), part that makes it spin, lid.
This is how it works:
1) Take colander part outside and fill with salad greens. If your lettuce is looseleaf (many lettuces are), you can either cut off the big outer leaves, cut the whole thing about 2 inches above the stem (it will regrow!), or pull the whole thing out of the ground and cut off the dirty root part (it will not regrow at this point). Many kinds of lettuce, spinach, mizuna, arugula, kale, lemon balm, sorrel, cress, miner’s lettuce, and chives, are some of my favorite ingredients (for now).
2) Come back inside and cut or tear leaves into bit sized pieces and put them in the bowl (inspect for slugs while you do this).
3) Fill bowl with cold water – enough so that you can swish the greens around and rinse them off.
4) Take rinsed greens (a few at a time) out of water and put them back in colander. You should end up with dirty, greenish water with a few small specks in it (and maybe slugs – they sink to the bottom). You can throw this out or use it to water the garden. You can also repeat steps 3 and 4 if the greens were really dirty.
5) Put colander (with now-clean greens in it) back inside bowl.
6) Attach spinny part to top of bowl
7) Spin! Spin! Spin!
8) Take spinny part off, add roasted nuts, blue cheese crumbles, or caramelized red onion, or whatever you can imagine, add your favorite dressing and enjoy!
Commenting is closed for this article.