WILD HERB SALAD

serves 4

What You Need

For the Salad

A large bunch of fresh organic rocket or 2 hearts of cos lettuce, sliced or torn
1 light green lettuce of your choice (not iceberg, since the flavor does not work with herbs, but you can use chicory here if you like)
A dozen leaves of purslane
18 leaves of fresh basil
18 sprigs of lamb’s lettuce
A dozen leaves of wild rocket (if you can get it)
A small bunch of fresh tarragon
6 sprigs of lovage
A dozen leaves of fresh broadleaf parsley
1 small radicchio (red lettuce)
1 red onion, chopped, or some fat red radishes slivered for color
1 yellow capsicum, sliced
1 red capsicum, sliced
A handful of the best fat black olives you can buy
A few sprigs of fennel or mustard green with their yellow flowers for color
A small handful of Marigold petals

For the Dressing

6 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
Several dashes of Worcester sauce
Spiky sea salt and fresh ground pepper
A dash of Cajun seasoning to taste

Here’s How

Wash the rocket and lettuces and dry in a salad basket, then dry and shred diagonally in medium pieces or tear in bite-size chunks and place in a flat salad bowl. Chill this in the fridge for half an hour. Wash the lamb’s lettuce, getting rid of the root ends, then whirl it in a salad basket to dry and wrap it in a tea towel to chill. Wash and prepare all the other ingredients similarly and chill them for 15 minutes. When you’re ready to serve the salad, remove the salad bowl lined with your cos or rocket. Arrange the herbs and sprigs, including the lamb’s lettuce, in the bowl and add whatever additions, such as capsicums, red peppers, radishes or olives, that you wish. Now add the ingredients for the dressing one by one on top of the salad right into the bowl and toss lightly. Garnish with flower petals and chopped mustard greens, fennel and mint if you happen to have it, and serve immediately on individual flat dishes. This salad needs little tossing. Some of its ingredients are very strong, but others are rather fragile, so what it does need is careful handling.

My favorite way of eating herbs – above all else – is in a wild herb salad. This is a salad you can make with almost anything. But the more wild herbs you use, and the more dark green vegetables, the better it works. Even the flavor of this salad is wild. Its nutritional value is superb. I often base my wild herb salads on fresh organic rocket, the seeds of which were given me by a friend who runs a wonderful Italian restaurant in London and who grows many of his own vegetables and herbs. If you ever get your hands on wild rocket seed, you’ve only to plant it in the ground, pretty much regardless of the weather or time of year, and it will not only germinate but return year after year.

There is really no end to what you can put into a wild herb salad, so long as the herbs are edible and not too strong in flavor. One of my favorite herbs is purslane, which is a wonderful source of antioxidants and has more heart-healthful omega 3 fatty acids than any other vegetable yet studied. These days you can buy purslane in a supermarket, but it also grows wild. When I can’t get wild rocket I use ordinary rocket. Among the other herbs that I use are broad-leaved parsley, basil (my favorite herb, which I probably use too much of as a result), tarragon, lamb’s lettuce or mâche and – another of my favorites – lovage. I mix my wild herbs with more common greens, such as organic rocket and some sort of light green lettuce, just to give variations in color

To make this salad you certainly don’t need all the ingredients listed here. You can make it with as little as two or three different herbs. I love to sprinkle the whole lot afterwards with edible flowers, like marigold petals, just for color This is a recipe that you can make a hundred ways and it works out perfectly each time. Don’t be afraid to omit ingredients such as olives or lovage if you don’t happen to have any.

The most powerful of all groups of plants for health are the herbs. This is because they tend to be richer than the fruits and vegetables in terms of their antioxidant and other health-giving phytochemicals. But there is something else involved too. Herbs have to struggle hard to survive. This means that any weakness that may have originally appeared in the plant is likely to have been weeded out over a multitude of generations; otherwise the plant would not have survived. Herbs therefore have a very strong life-force that they carry and can bring to us.

I use herbs as often as I can in what I cook, and I like to use them raw whenever I can. In fact when I’m using a herb such as sage or thyme or rosemary in a cooked dish I often cook what needs to be cooked and then add the herb right at the end so that it maintains all of its wonderful nutritional and energetic properties – not to mention its brighter color and stronger taste.