Our first spring salad.

Admittedly, this isn’t exactly going to be the most complicated recipe we’ve ever posted. But it is one of the most seasonal ones. After all, there’s nothing better to mark the transition into the new gardening year than the season’s first homegrown salad.  While we’re always excited about providing for ourselves all winter with our jars of preserved homegrown foodstuffs, we always begin to deeply resent applesauce come the middle of April. (And there are still four jars to go…)

This weekend we were able to pull together our first “real live salad.” Although our lettuce seedlings are still barely sprouted, we had the amazing good fortune of watching the snow melt and realizing that a few of last fall’s spinach plants had survived the winter completely unaided. That borders on miraculous. We think the heavy, steady snow cover must have served to insulate the bed. Or whatever. We don’t really care why it happened. Never look a gift salad in the mouth.

This small outcropping of Bloomsdale Lonstanding Spinach surived a harsh winter in our garden.

But there wasn’t quite enough spinach for both of us, so we put on our foraging hats (no, they don’t have little flashlights) and went in search of dandelions. Such a search at The Beekman could be measured in steps – two to be exact. We’re smothered in dandelions this time of year. But we have a short window. Fresh dandelion leaves only taste palatable before they blossom. Some chefs claim they’re at their peak when the flower bud is just emerging from the ground, but before it shoots up and opens.

"Dandelion" derives from the french name for its toothlike leaves - the "dents" of a lion.

Most people know that they can eat dandelion leaves. But few ever do. We’re not sure why not. Perhaps it’s their bad lawn rep. They’re just as tasty as most mesclun varieties, and they’re packed with nutrients. 1 C of raw dandelion leaves has 112% percent of your daily Vitamin A requirement. That’s more than nearly any other source you can think of.

After collecting our dandelions and spinach we decided that perhaps we could thin out a few sprouts from the garden for variety. We snipped some radish sprouts, and a couple of too close for comfort pea shoots.

A French Breakfast Radish sprout.

A tasty Thomas Laxton Pea Shoot.

Everyone knows that the dressing is what makes the salad. We added some chopped chives and crushed lemon thyme (that had also survived the winter) to our homemade apple cider vinegar and let it steep a few hours in the sun. (More about making your own vinegar here.)

Lemon thyme has all the flavor of French Thyme, with an acidic lemony edge.

A week of unseasonably hot spring weather has sent our chives to flower already.

A little olive oil was all we needed to make a simple vinaigrette. (We typically use a ratio of 2 pts oil to 1 pt vinegar, though many cooks would advise 3 pts oil to 1 pt vinegar.)

A vinegrette made from our homemade apple cider vinegar, olive oil, lemon thyme & chives.

Are we going to win any culinary awards for our Dandelion Spinach Radish & Pea Shoot salad? Probably not. Do we care? …Even less than the odds of eating our way through this:

It would take us forever to eat through our yard.

We have no worries, because spring eating season is finally here!

(Do you think the goats would finish up those last four jars of applesauce?)