Winter Salads

Last spring and summer my garden produced the most wonderful lettuce and other greens. We had salad after salad, with rich, complex tastes and "toothiness". Evening is time to go out and pick whatever is ready to go into the salad -- kale, lettuce, herbs, and at this remove I can't even remember what else. I just know that yesterday, which by my reckoning was the first day of spring (count them from the first nice one in March or you may not get any), I began to think about starting lettuce in a cold frame. I've never done that before.
Between last summer's salads and now there's a long time. You have to have salad in the winter, but I just can't any more serve those pallid bowls full of "annie's organic greens" from Chile or California, packed in plastic and containing at least a couple of black and wilted leaves. So I've invented winter salads.
1. I use a lot of Romaine lettuce. No one thinks that Romaine is gourmet -- it's the new iceberg. You buy a bag of three heads in a sealed plastic bag. Sometimes I wash it, sometimes I don't. I usually cut it with a sharp knife, starting with the leafy end and slicing in 1/2" (or so) pieces. It keeps for a long time in the fridge and can be added to my "winter salad" no matter what other ingredients I use.
2. I usually make the dressing with cider vinegar. I have a quart bottle of Bragg Raw Unfiltered Organic Apple Cider Vinegar. According to Cooks Illustrated, vinegar lasts just about forever, and that's been my experience. I find the raw, acidic taste of cider vinegar perfect for winter salads. (Sometimes I use rice wine vinegar.) I use the exellent oilve oil that my brother in law Evan keeps be supplied in.
3. The other ingredients of a "winter salad" might be -- thinly sliced -- cabbage (white or red, or savoy), bok choy, endive, radicchio, spinach. I sometimes add grated carrot, fresh parsley, fennel -- kind of whatever is in the fridge. The fennel adds a really nice texture and flavor.
4. My brother Eric is staying with us and he doesn't do well with raw onions. So I often slice a red onion and marinte it in baslamic vinegar and serve so that people can add it as they want.

Your commets please, and more to come...