Read these 5 Lettuce Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Vegetable tips and hundreds of other topics.
A small patch of garden or a large shallow bowl is all you need to grow your own salad. The bowl can sit on a sunny windowsill and has the advantage of being out of the way of slugs and snails that have a taste for fresh lettuce. No more the careful planting and re-planting of tiny seedlings, as now gardeners have developed the ultimate ‘cut-and-come-again' salad. In the UK, the seeds go by the brand of ‘Salad bowl' and come in a variety of mixes; green leaves, red leaves or both.
Sow your seeds carefully and keep them moist. A week later your lettuce starts to make an appearance. Move the bowl into a sunny position and start cutting the leaves as soon as they're big enough.
The best thing about salad bowl lettuce: the more you cut it, the more it grows.
Watercress is a good source of iron and very tasty too. Try it with roast beef and horseradish in sandwiches or chopped and stirred into soft cheese such as ricotta as a dip. Teamed with sliced ripe pears, toasted walnuts and soft goats cheese it makes a fantastic salad or light starter to a more substantial meal. And if you're lucky enough to have a glut of it, you could do worse than stirring a mountain of chopped watercress into a deeply savory vegetable or chicken stock, and adding a handful of noodles, for an almost instant warming, de-stressing lunch.
Don't soak produce. Rinse it with running water or lift it in and out of clean water. Lifting it up and down is a better cleaning action than soaking, avoiding the loss of water soluble nutrients.
If vegetables are leafy, it is best to wash one leaf, certainly no more than a few leaves, at a time.
Leafy vegetables such as lettuce and cabbage should have the outer leaves pulled off and discarded. Then the heads should be washed and drained.
Guru Spotlight |
Carma Spence-Pothitt |