3 hour salad

Tonight I had a salad for dinner. It took me 3 hours to prepare.  Today was probably among my favorite days for 3 reasons:

• I took the morning off to tend to home stuff so I got to linger in bed and see a beautiful sunrise.  I tried taking a picture of it but it's not quite the same. . .you'd have to be here.
• Yesterday's flood that soaked two of my carpets on the 1st floor was cleaned up by the nicest Embassy employee ever
• I recieved my 1st basket of organic veggies. It was 3 hour mixed blessing. More on that below.
• I learned you can cook radishes. Not 'til tomorrow though. . .I'm pooped.
• I had my 2nd gardening lesson with Rojatien.  He is the Embassy gardener, who has agreed to teach me how to maintain my garden/yard at home.  I did shrub and plant cutting. A fabulous workout!

So these are my veggies.

When I picked them up this afternoon I knew I was in for a long night of cleaning, disinfecting and cutting the yummies.  Although they are organic with little to no pesticides used, the concern is more about what was in the dirt (fecal matter, naughty bacteria, etc.) and the handling of the food. Hand-washing, especially with potable, parasite-free water is a rarity.  So after the gardening lesson, it was to the kitchen for the next few hours.

Garden trivia: If you can identify all of the veggies in the basket and you earn less than $45,000 (more on that in another post) I'll pay for 3/4 of your round trip ticket to visit me in Benin!!:).



A close up of some of my basket goodies. Hint: These are 3 herbs.

So, what took me so long to prepare the veggies?  Washing, soaking, soaking and more soaking.  Can one soak veggies too much in my new BFF (Bleach Fun and Fabulousness)?  I don't think so.  When you travel to any developing country be sure that your fruits and veggies are soaked in 1 tbsp bleach and 1gallon of water for at least 15 minutes. Lettuce is particularly hard to clean due to the leafiness hence the extra effort to cleanse it. 







This was the 1st lettuce soak.  The second one was very much like it. I ended up leaving it for 30 minutes while I cleaned and soaked the other veggies.


My letti taking a rest in the drainer. They had quite a bleach workout.

Drying the lettuce

Enjoying the 1st taste of my labor.  It was quite delicious. Almost worth it.

As I neared the end of the labor of love of fruits and veggies, I whipped up a papaya (yes, Sidney, I took your advice) mango, and orange vinaigrette.  It was delicious!

These were the other veggies cleaned and (still) soaking that I plan to eat raw, juiced or in salad.  Actually, I found a recipe for butter-braised radishes so I'll try that. 

These are the ones I will cook over the next few days.  I plan to make a sauce with some, saute others and  perhaps bake the rest.  So in addition to cleaning the lettuce, it took about 3 hours to clean most of my veggies in between soaks. Thank you for indulging my obsession with my veggies basket.  It made for quite a full and eventful evening. I probably need to go take them out of my BFF now.

A bientot!