You can't really believe it by looking at all the snow still left on the ground around our home that with March coming in on Monday that
meteorological spring will also start tomorrow. I think everyone is looking forward to the coming of March but we don't want to put away our winter jackets just yet.
Jack yesterday did shovel all the remaining snow off the patio furniture and off the brick patio. While he did that I raked leaves out of the flower beds on the east side of the house. It felt good to see some flower beds sans snow and leaves and with little green things beginning to appear above the ground.
The most snow has melted in the front of the house and along the east side. The more shaded back of the house and the west side of the house still has snow over a foot deep and it is still very hard to walk on these sides of the house. Each time you step in the foot deep snow it feels like you are stepping into hardened cement that scratches your ankles and legs.
But to put ourselves in a spring mood I fixed our spring tonic for supper. My mom and dad in Ohio always enjoyed picking wild dandelion greens in the very early spring and then fixing them to serve over fried potatoes. I didn't gather my dandelions along the roadside like my mom used to do but bought them at Wegmans grocery. I have no idea where Wegmans got them.
By the way, my godmother Agnes Dapore who lived just down the road from our farmhouse always managed to beat my mom in finding and serving the first dandelion greens of the year. She would walk down the road to visit with my mom and my mom would say we just had dandelions and Agnes would reply that she had her first batch two weeks ago. LOL!
Below is the recipe for wilted dandelion salad over fried potatoes:
Wilted Dandelion Salad With Fried Potatoes
1. Wash, dry and break into pieces the dandelion greens and place in large salad bowl.
2. Add about four hardboiled eggs that have been cut up into large chunks to the salad.
3. Add about four well fried pieces of bacon that been broken into pieces to the salad. Save bacon
drippings to be used for salad dressing.
4. Add two coarsely chopped green onions to the salad.
5. Add several sliced raw radishes to the salad.
6. Sprinkle salad with salt and grind some pepper over it.
7. Set salad aside and prepare the fried potatoes in this fashion: in a warm skillet place some
olive oil, then add some garlic, a yellow onion chopped fine and three or four potatoes peeled
and sliced. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Let potato slices brown on both sides.
Then lower the heat and continue frying the potatoes for about 15 minutes or till done.
8. Right before sitting down to eat heat up the bacon grease and add a pinch of salt and a pinch
of pepper and a tablespoon of sugar. Then add one to two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.
Bring this dressing to a rolling boil for one minute. Then remove from heat, pour over
the dandelion salad and toss the salad to dress the salad.
9. The way my parents ate this was by placing a heap of fried potatoes on a plate and then
covering the potatoes with the wilted dandelion salad.
10. By the way any ordinary or exotic lettuce like either iceberg or frisee or radicchio can also
be prepared in this fashion.
While we were knee deep in snow this winter I stayed warm inside my house and read lots and lots of books. Below is a list of some of the books I really enjoyed reading. I seem to have chosen many novels and memoirs connected to Eastern Europe and the Middle East and India.
