Salad Days

Why have the same mayonnaise-laden tuna when you can make a light, fresh salad that won’t hold you back while you chase the kids around the yard?

Salad al Tonno
Serves 2-4

1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
8 cups chopped hearts of romaine
2 medium tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup sliced pimiento-stuffed green olives
2 6-ounce cans chunk light tuna, drained

Whisk lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Add romaine, tomatoes and olives; toss to coat. Add tuna and toss again.

Nutritional Wisdom
Canned white tuna comes from the large albacore and can be high in mercury content. Chunk light tuna, on the other hand, which comes from smaller fish, skipjack or yellowfin, is best for health-conscious eaters. According to a recent study, canned white tuna samples averaged about 315 percent more mercury than chunk light tuna samples.

Cherry tomatoes straight off the vine are absolutely divine - sweet little bursts of flavor. If your plants are producing a bumper crop (or you visit the garden of Costco), give this salad a try. The trick to keeping this salad from getting soggy is to salt the tomatoes and spin them in a salad spinner.

Greek Cherry Tomato Salad

4 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
table salt
1/2 tsp sugar
2 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tsp ried oregano, or 1 1/2 tsp fresh oregano
1 shallot, minced
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
ground black pepper
1 small cucumber , peeled, seeded, and cut into 1/2-inch dice
1/2 cup chopped pitted kalamata olives
4 ounces feta cheese , crumbled (about 1 cup)
3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley leaves

Toss tomatoes, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and sugar in medium bowl; let stand for 30 minutes. Transfer tomatoes to salad spinner and spin until seeds and excess liquid have been removed, 45 to 60 seconds, stirring to redistribute tomatoes several times during spinning. Return tomatoes to bowl and set aside. Strain tomato liquid through fine-mesh strainer into liquid measuring cup, pressing on solids to extract as much liquid as possible.

Bring 1/2 cup tomato liquid (discard any extra), garlic, oregano, shallot, and vinegar to simmer in small saucepan over medium heat. Simmer until reduced to 3 tablespoons, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer mixture to small bowl and cool to room temperature, about 5 minutes. Whisk in oil and pepper to taste until combined. Taste and season with up to 1/8 teaspoon table salt.

Add cucumber, olives, feta, dressing, and parsley to bowl with tomatoes; toss gently and serve.

Ezra Klein has a piece in today’s Washington Post about meat and climate change. He highlights the fact that many top environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, basically refuse to talk about diet.

Yet diet is often the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint:

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you’d otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn’t require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn’t mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It’s healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that “you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch.” Given that PB&J is delicious, it’s not the world’s most onerous commitment.

I certainly have no ambition to curb my love for bacon. I’ll just point out that eating a juicy salad instead of a hamburger just one night a week will do more for improving the planet than eating a 100% local diet (which in all practicality is nearly impossible to do).