My body and mind are so much happier with me now that I have a proper kitchen and have taken a couple of fruitful trips to the Whole Paycheck and the local mexican and asian markets. I scored some ramps, since I had never had them and my friend H has been obsessing about them lately, AND they were looking pretty nice in the market, and $2.50 is cheap for a thrill.
I turned them into two salads, three really if you count the green salad I made for dinner one night with garrotxa cheese, ramps, green leaf lettuce, grape tomatoes, & carrots. The ramps & garrotxa complemented each other well and their nuttiness went well with the sweet tomatoes and carrots. Anyway, the ones in the picture are a barley salad with grated carrots, sliced celery, grape tomatoes and ramp greens in a simple vinaigrette, and a french green lentil salad with currants, ramp whites and peppadew peppers in similar vinaigrette. Lord, I love those damn peppadews! This lentil salad is my favorite — all nutty sweet vinegary goodness. The combination really works, and it’s so simple. If you haven’t got any ramps, you could swap in shallots to good effect, I would think.
I served these (to myself) with a skirt steak panfried rare with a cilantro chimichurri. Ahhh, vegetables, fiber, meat, fresh flavors! Whew.
ramps! i think i’ve only read about them in like, ye olde english countryside novels and where some statesider moves to european countryside. do you cook them or eat them raw?
you can eat them raw or cooked. i did mine raw this time, because i wanted to know what they were like in their simplest form. Once i started thinking about it, i realized that i think i may have had them once in a foofy restaurant in braised form, sort of like leeks. I don’t remember them well, so perhaps it is better to eat them raw, so you can enjoy the novelty of them more completely. They did seem nuttier and more wild tasting than your usual allium suspects, which was very nice with my barley and lentils and sweet flavors. They are also apparently fleeting — you can only get them in springtime. Or so they claim.
i wanna eat chez toi! yummers! nothing like a good skirt steak (called arrachera here in the Mexican markets where it is a whole lot cheaper than the whole paycheck…though not always as tender, alas).