Apple Iceberg Salad

Pumpkin patches in Snohomish. Amazon this week. Sprint planning Tuesday. Two hours of meetings I could have been a Slack message.

Hana, 2, on a step stool stirring miso into broth. She knows the order. She is bilingual already in food vocabulary. Jisoo FaceTimed Tuesday. We made doenjang jjigae together — me in Wallingford, her in Haeundae. Eleven thousand miles. The same soup.

Kabocha squash simmered in dashi-soy. The fall on the plate.

Drove to Bellevue Saturday. Karen was tired. I brought soft food. She ate.

I sat at the kitchen counter Sunday with a notebook open. The writing came slow. The writing came.

Rain on the porch all afternoon Saturday. The Wallingford rain is its own weather. I sat with a book and a tea and did not move for two hours.

I read a thread on the Korean Adoptee subreddit Saturday. Some posts brought up old anger. Most are people figuring it out in real time. We are not unique. We are a community.

Sprint review at Amazon Friday. Two hours. I could have been on a podcast.

Jisoo sent a photo of the dol the kids did for our visit last summer. The photo went on the fridge.

The kimchi crock was bubbling Saturday morning when I checked. The bubbling is the right bubbling. The fermentation knew what it was doing.

The shiso on the south fence is fragrant and unruly. I brushed past it taking the compost out and the smell stopped me. The smell is the country. The smell is Jisoo's apartment.

A blog reader wrote about her own adoptee experience. We exchanged three emails this week.

James and I had date night Friday. Indian restaurant on 45th. We ate too much. We sat in the car after talking about nothing for an hour. The marriage is the marriage.

Sunday farmers market on Wallingford Avenue. The kabocha at the Asian vendor's stall. The shishito peppers. The brokered conversation. We bought too much. We always do.

I made coffee at seven. Hana ate cereal at seven-fifteen. Min wandered down at seven-twenty-five. James left for work at eight. The morning was the morning. The standard.

The Capitol Hill apartment kitchen is small. We make it work.

Hana left a Lego on the kitchen floor. I stepped on it at two AM. Standard.

The newsletter went out Sunday morning. The opening sentence took an hour. The piece took five. The piece was what it needed to be.

Therapy Tuesday with Dr. Kim. We talked about the parents — the two sets, the one living, the one gone, the one who became real after thirty years and the one who was real my whole life and is now gone. The work is the layered work.

David came over for Sunday dinner. He brought some tomatoes from the Bellevue garden.

I sat at the kitchen counter at six AM with a notebook and a cup of green tea. Writing time before the house wakes. The pre-light hour is the only writing hour I trust.

Yoga Tuesday morning at the studio. The forward fold released something I had been carrying in the shoulder. The mat is the mat.

I texted Jisoo a photo of the kimchi in the new onggi pot. She replied with the thumb-up emoji and a Korean-language critique. The duality is the gift.

My Korean is improving. Slowly. Painfully. Conversationally adequate now. I can argue about kimchi proportions in two languages, which is a milestone in any marriage between mother and daughter.

Reading at night. A novel by a Korean-American writer about a family in 1990s LA. I underlined four sentences. The underlining is the marking-of-the-territory of the soul.

The kabocha came home from the Wallingford farmers market in a cloth bag along with the shishito peppers and more than we needed, as always — but it was the apples at the next stall over, the small irregular ones that smelled actually like apples, that I kept thinking about all afternoon. This salad is the careful kind of cooking: nothing that requires watching, nothing that can go wrong, just the fall arranged on a plate. After a week of Sprint planning and two-AM Lego injuries and the layered work of therapy, I needed a recipe that asked almost nothing of me and gave the season back.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 10 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 small head iceberg lettuce, cored and torn into rough pieces
2 medium crisp apples (such as Fuji, Honeycrisp, or Pink Lady), cored and thinly sliced
1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
1/3 cup crumbled blue cheese or sharp white cheddar
1/4 cup toasted walnuts or pecans, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon honey or maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Make the dressing. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the apple cider vinegar, olive oil, honey, and Dijon mustard until emulsified. Season with salt and pepper. Taste and adjust — it should be bright and just slightly sweet.
Prep the produce. Tear the iceberg into palm-sized pieces and arrange in a wide, shallow bowl or on a large plate. Slice the apples thin (no need to peel) and scatter over the lettuce along with the red onion.
Add the toppings. Sprinkle the crumbled cheese and toasted nuts evenly over the salad.
Dress and serve. Drizzle the dressing over just before serving — this salad does not hold once dressed. Toss gently at the table or serve undressed and let each person finish their own plate.

Nutrition (per serving)

Apple Iceberg Salad — The Farmers Market Sunday, the Fall on the Plate