Veg in the Spotlight: Lettuce | Canalside Community Food

With a significant amount of lettuce in the share as growth ramps up with the arrival of warm weather, it’s timely to share some inspiration for this summer share staple. The growers ‘cut and come again’ with our salad leaves as it allows us to keep cropping* the same plants until they bolt** ready to set seed*** later in the summer. We’re currently harvesting the first batch of outdoor lettuce. Later successions of sowings will mean we can keep harvesting lettuce right through until the end of the summer and into early autumn. This means that we can offer a mixed salad each week (currently including ‘Red’, ‘Paris de Blonde’, ‘Lollo Biondi’ and ‘Maravilla de Verano’) and we get the maximum produce from each plant for the least work.

*harvesting from
**send up a flower head
***make seeds for the next generation of plants

I remember really struggling to use all my salad in my first summer or two of Canalside produce, so until you’re ready to eat it by the handful straight from the bag (if that day ever comes for you!), hopefully some of these ideas will help you make the most of our summer leaves.

If you have a copy of the Boxing Clever Cookbook – the one cookbook I do go on about because it’s so useful for ideas and inspiration for using highly abundant seasonal veg – you’ll be able to find no less than 9 lettuce recipes! Eight of them can use loose leaves in the way we offer them, including 5 types of soup, lettuce and coconut chutney and lettuce risotto.

It also has a recipe for lettuce and walnut loaf – a sweet cake-like one with cinnamon and sugar. If you’re intrigued enough to try it, this seems to be the same recipe and here’s one using ginger and mace instead of cinnamon – a vintage 1968 recipe from the Kansas Wheat Commission.

Otherwise the following recipes can all be used with loose leaves, either whole or chopped:

Lettuce risotto with goat’s cheese from Delicious magazine – double tick as it would also use spring onions from this week’s share

Quick braised lettuce and peas from BBC Good Food

Garden salad, with a dressing recipe that also incorporates spring onion from this week’s share

If you eat animal protein, this dish might interest you:
Cod with bacon, lettuce and peas from BBC Good Food

There’s also an array of salad dressing recipes online of course – if you’d like to browse recipes for dressings that Rebecca has tried and shared, you’ll find them on the blog on our website here.

For recipes from Rebecca that would specifically use basil from the plants you collected recently, look here.