Salad and soup

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, November 13, 2009—

I'M ALWAYS WRITING toward the end of these entries: green salad. Sometimes, green salad, naturally. We take it pretty much for granted; I hardly even see it. But when I set the bowl down today I saw it, and saw how pretty it is.

It was the usual salad: greens from a local farmer (my garden is between lettuces at the moment) in vinaigrette, which I make by crushing a clove of garlic in the empty salad bowl, mashing it up with sea salt, using a dinner fork, then covering the crushed garlic with olive oil and letting it stand while we eat dinner. I add the vinegar — our own, from Zinfandel — just before tossing the salad, and drizzle a teeny bit more oil on the leaves, and a judicious sprinling of salt.
The Italians, I'm told, say it takes four men to make salad: a generous man with the oil, a stingy one with the vinegar, a judge to measure the salt, and a maniac to toss it all together. In our house, Lindsey's the maniac.
Oh. Soup, of course. C'est pas possible, diner sans la soupe, is how that story about the soup ends.

Syrah, Central Coast, 2007