Arugula & Other Salad Greens | The Nibble Webzine Of Food Adventures

TIP OF THE DAY: Try New Salad Greens

August 13, 2010 at 7:34 am · Filed under Diet Nibbles, Tip Of The Day, Vegetables-Salads-Herbs

If the last new salad item you discovered was radicchio, you’re behind the times.

The Wild Rocket Zest mix from Fresh Express can show you what you’re missing.

One of the two new seasonal blends from Fresh Express, the two newest blends are:

Sierra Crisp Herb Salad, mild red baby butter lettuce, parsley and cilantro (in the winter the herbs switch to parsley and chervil).

Wild Rocket Zest, combining the bold flavors of spinach, peppery wild rocket (a wild variety of arugula), mustard greens and tatsoi for zesty flavors (in the winter, chard will switch places with the spinach).

Don’t be confused: rocket is the British word for what we call arugula. Other names include colewort, rucola, rucoli, rugula, roquette and salad rocket.

The greens are grown by artisan growers in “America’s Salad Bowl,” Salinas Valley, California (which, as readers of John Steinbeck will recall, is some 20 miles northeast of Monterey). They are often referred to as microgreens.

For those who have grown up on bland iceberg or romaine covered in dressing to add taste, it’s eye-opening to see how much flavor is added by amaranth, mizuna, red mustard, rocket/arugula and other “artisan greens.” The next time you’re at the market, pick up something you haven’t tried before and give it a shot.

We adore the Wild Rocket Zest Mix from Fresh Express. Rocket is the British word for arugula (photo by Katharine Pollak |THE NIBBLE).

You may find that you don’t even need dressing. Often, a squeeze of lemon or lime or a splash of verjus works just fine.

By the way, there are four main categories or classifications of lettuce:

Butterhead lettuce has buttery-textured leaves (Bibb and Boston lettuces are examples).

Crisphead lettuce has a head that resembles cabbage (iceberg lettuce is an example).

Looseleaf or leaf lettuce has tender, delicate and mildly flavored leaves, arranged around a central stalk. They tend to be slightly curly, with firm central ribs (oak leaf and red leaf lettuces are examples).

Romaine or Cos lettuce grows in a long head of sturdy leaves with a firm rib.

Stem, Asparagus or Chinese lettuce, has thick stalks that are cooked and prepared in ways similar to asparagus (celtuce is an example).

Rotate them in your (hopefully) daily salad.

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