ELC Day 26: Salad

I’ve saved some choice ingredients for our final week of the Eat Local Challenge, and the change in seasons means we’ll be getting a little variety in our diet. Breakfast was my usual goat milk & honey muffins, chock full of toasted pecans. Lunch was tomato and arugula sandwiches. Dinner was this tasty salad, made with lettuce and arugula from our garden, Sweet Home’s Bayside Blue cheese, market tomatoes, cucumbers, and satsumas, and vinaigrette with Perdido Farm’s wine vinegar. Unfortunately, that’s all the lettuce that’s mature now, so we won’t be having any more salad this week. Still, it was nice for a change!
For readers outside the Gulf region, if you’re not familiar with satsumas (I wasn’t before I moved here), they’re better known to most people as mandarin oranges. The fruits are sweet and juicy, with a good orange flavor. They are small and the skins are easily removed, both attributes which make them popular with children (like my daughter, who loves them). Satsumas are one of the most cold-hardy citrus, and they can be grown even in the north part of the state. We have a young satsuma in our yard that we planted this spring, and it’s weighed down by eight fruits. If you have a friend with a satsuma in her yard, you generally know it, because mature plants produce more than a single family can easily eat.