Lettuce

If you have never examined the lettuce that make up your salad, then you are missing out. Of course we all know iceberg, romain, and that everchanging spring/mesculan mix. I was able to pick specific lettuce varieties for a special salad this past week. The Chef's Garden has an eye poping quantity of lettuces and greens in a variety of sizes making it very easy to come up with something unique. This unique blend of greens was dressed in a very simple, sweetened, red wine vinagraitte, with pickled Chef's Garden baby carrots, and Coulrouge soft ripened cows milk cheese from Moucol artisianal creamery in Colorado.

Cryatal Verde Lettuce has a very succulant leaf that holds an amazing amount of moisture for it's size. It's flavor is very mild, and green. Due to this extream succulance this lettuce seems to have a shorter shelf life than most other.

Red Komatsuna lettuce is a wonderful bi-colored leaf lettuce that has a sweet flavor with hardy leaves. The eye appeal of deep purplish red, and bright green all in one leaf is a great asset to this mildly flavored lettuce.

This Ruffled Red Mustard brought a whole lot to the salad. It's branching leaves added alot of volume to the salad, and the tangy flavor was a plesant contrast with the milder greens. This Lettuce showed the best shelf life as we used it as a garnish 4 days after it arrived

Sweet Dandelion Greens are a far streach from the bitingly bitter mature dandelion greens most of us think of. At this stage of their growth the leaves are plesantly tender all the way down the stalk. Out of the four this was my overall favorite.