Ode to a Swedish salad spinner

Ode to a Swedish salad spinner

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 

John Keats- “Ode to a Grecian Urn”

Its cheap plastic contours will never be confused for the smooth white marble of Athens and it has none of the pastoral carving that inspired Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” but there is no kitchen implement that makes eating from the garden easier than a salad spinner - and that includes a pot.

I got mine at Ikea (www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60148678/) where it is currently on sale for less than $2.

(Mine actually looks less like a Grecian urn and more like a misplaced Storm Trooper helmet but Keats didn’t write an elegy to a Storm Trooper helmet, so an urn it is.)

The one thing that grows year round in the garden is leafy greens – kale, collards, mustard, lettuce, arugula, malabar spinach, bok choi and on and on. All these things can be cooked in any style you like or eaten raw but they all need to be washed and that is a pain in the ass.

The folds of mustard hold dirt like Velcro and, despite our best organic efforts, pests like aphids and caterpillars still set up house in the nooks and crannies of our curly leaf kale.

I almost always wash and package everything I pick all at once into bags of larger greens for cooking and lettuce/baby greens to eat raw.  

For a little extra time on the front end, I have greens and lettuce ready to go. It means I am more likely to throw in some greens when I am cooking dinner or lets me whip up a quick salad for lunch before I head out the door for work.

The easiest and most thorough way that I have found to wash anything from the garden is to soak it in the sink for 15 to 30 minutes. A shorter soak is fine but a longer one gets off more of the dirt without having to touch up individual leaves by hand. 

A longer soak also ensures that any bugs that might be hiding on the under sides of leaves can’t hold their breath through the wash cycle and end up in the sink instead of your salad.

Let the water do the work.

But a long soak and curly leaves also means a wet mess when you drain the water, which brings us back to that sexy little salad spinner.
Put on some music to get you pumped up, maybe do a couple stretches and then pull the greens out of the sink, drop them in the spinner and go to town.

When the water stops pouring out the bottom, stick your newly washed organic greens in a ziplock bag in your fridge and get ready to have an amazing week.

But, before you give it a quick rinse and put it back on the shelf, take a second to appreciate supple curves, the simple physics and the timeless beauty of that white plastic Swedish salad spinner.