Sunday Dinner: Homemade Pizza and a Salad

We took advantage of this beautiful weekend to finish up some garden clean-up chores that we had put off while working on the kitchen. Now all the garden beds are tidied up for the winter, and all the root vegetables are mulched and ready for cold weather.

Part of the clean up included harvesting some beets and beet greens that are not under plastic. I also picked the last radishes, which have done admirably in the cold without any protection. Add some last snippets of broccoli and a carrot, and you have a tasty winter salad:

We were a little disappointed to discover that most of the arugula and lettuce in the greenhouse tunnels was limp and mushy from the wide temperature fluctuations over the past month, so this salad is mostly beet greens taken when we pulled the beets for storage. (There's a tiny bit of arugula from a volunteer patch, but not much.) That makes for a strongly flavored salad, so Kirk balanced it out with a sweet new dressing:

Honey Sesame Dressing

2 Tbs. sesame oil

1 Tbs. red wine vinegar

1 tsp. dijon mustard

1 tsp. raw honey

juice of half a lime

salt and pepper to taste

Whisk the ingredients together to emulsify just before serving. This makes just shy of a quarter-cup of dressing, which is plenty to dress a family-size salad. 

The sweetness of the honey works really well with the strong beet greens, and the sesame oil has a really nice nuttiness. This is a winner for cool-wearer green salads with flavorful leaves like chard, kale,  beet greens, and arugula.