Free vegetables and herbs? It’s a Big Ass Salad.

The Irish Food Bloggers Association asked for recipes to appear in their ‘Something for the weekend’ series. I did a short version of this post for the purpose. Here’s the full story. 

The Wicklow Hunter is a passionate man. This year, he has taken to growing vegetables and herbs in his expansive spread in the Garden of Ireland. He does not do things by half. So his first crop of vegetables has started to come into season over the past few weeks. Like so many enthusiasts before him, he is discovering that growing the vegetables can be easier than giving them away. In truth, so many urbanites prefer their salad to come in a bag and their vegetables to come out of the freezer. Research confirms that is what we prefer.

Salad ingredients don’t get much fresher than this.

Thankfully, I am not that way inclined. So I gratefully accepted when he very generously gave me a food parcel containing the following:

• A vegetable marrow
• A cucumber (It looks and tastes like nothing you have ever bought in a supermarket)
• Tomatoes (also looking and tasting unlike the insipid shop bought variety).
• Spring onions (see notes above)
• Potatoes
• A range of herbs including thyme, dill, rosemary, mint, lemon thyme, bay, flat leaf parsley, regular curly parsley and some others that I can’t remember right now.

This prompted me to buy a nice wedge of Stilton cheese and make what my youngest daughter referred to as a “Big Ass Salad”. Marketeers would tut-tut such a name. Researchers would suggest something like: “Hmmm, perhaps we could put ‘Big Ass’ and a few other names out to groups and see if anything bites.”  I was too enthused by the ingredients to think of a better name for it. So Big Ass it is.

 Here’s what I did:

Parboiled the potatoes and cut them up. Added olive oil, rosemary sea salt and black pepper.

Lovely sweet baby potatoes. Sprinkled with rosemary, sea salt and olive oil before roasting.

Then I roasted these until crisp.

Peeled and sliced along the length. The taste was so wonderful that not all of it made it to the salad.

While this was going on, I peeled and cut the cucumber, sliced, salted and drained the marrow before giving it a spell on the griddle.

For you who eat frozen veg by choice, this is what a marrow looks like. I took the picture outside to try to keep it real for you.

I also griddled some sweet peppers that were lying in the fridge.

It is not possible to show taste in a photograph. If it were, the awesome flavour of home-grown tomatoes would have done it.

I washed, trimmed and chopped everything else, adding some toasted pine nuts for a bit of nuttiness (what else). The result is in the picture.

The salty Stilton worked very well in the salad. Three of us devoured it in ten minutes.

It was a beautiful Big Ass Salad, perfect for a late summer weekend lunch. Though, I don’t think the name will stick, no matter what the research says.