A Delicious and Crunchy Salad - No Lettuce Anywhere!

We decided to play around a bit with the classic Celery & Green Olive salad - basically a very old Italian recipe in the Cucina Provera ("poor cooking") mode.

Happily, we found that we had much in our produce drawers that "needed to be used". There were gorgeous purple and reddish carrots, a watermelon radish, celery, Cerignola olives, parsley and mixed sprouts - our neighbors had a windfall of sprouts this past week and shared. Everything we found got sliced, pitted, and chopped and went into the bowl.

With a little creativity in the way you slice everything, you can create a truly beautiful salad. Remember - we eat with our eyes too. The artful slicing you see is all the work of my much better half, by the way.

We dressed the salad with a basic vinigarette (made with champagne vinegar) to which we added pinches of dried oregano, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and pepper flakes.

I highly recommend letting the salad sit for a bit. And the next day? Wow - you have an amazing salad again or you could chop it down some more and have a glorious relish to nap over fish or a piece of meat or even onto toasted bread for a bruschetta appetizer.

Enjoy.