By The end of the school year is approaching and I am teaching with a renewed intensity that surprises even me — I thought the pandemic year would leave me depleted, but instead it has left me hungry, hungry for the classroom, hungry for the students, hungry for the act of standing in front of young people and saying, "This book matters, and here's why." I am teaching "Beloved" to my advanced juniors — Toni Morrison, the hardest and most rewarding book I teach — and the experience of reading Morrison after a year of pandemic and isolation and the Capitol and the reckoning with race is producing a different kind of engagement from these students. They are not just reading. They are recognizing. A girl named Jasmine said, "Memory is a house you can't leave," which is about Sethe but also about everything, and I wrote it on the board and I thought: yes. Memory is a house. I live in it. Marvin is losing his. The house is the same but the occupants are different.
I made a spring salad — mixed greens, strawberries, goat cheese, candied pecans, a balsamic vinaigrette. Light and colorful and nothing like the heavy winter food I've been making for months. The salad was fresh and bright and I ate it on the porch and thought about the school year ending, about the summer coming, about the last September I will enter as a full-time teacher, because the thought has been forming — not yet a plan, not yet a decision, but a thought: retirement. The thought sits in the back of my mind like a student who hasn't raised her hand yet but has something to say. I am not ready to call on her. But I know she's there.
The strawberry-and-goat-cheese salad I ate on the porch that evening was really a mood more than a recipe — an impulse toward lightness after months of heaviness — and when I went back to formalize it into something I could actually share, I kept coming back to this Dill Garden Salad, which captures the same spirit: crisp greens, fresh herbs, the clean brightness of a garden just waking up. Dill has always felt like a spring herb to me, all optimism and green, and after a week of sitting inside Toni Morrison’s world, I needed something that tasted unmistakably like the present tense. This is a salad for porch-sitting, for the long light of late afternoon, for the particular relief of a school year almost done.
Dill Garden Salad
Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 15 min | Servings: 4
Ingredients
- 6 cups mixed salad greens or romaine, torn
- 1 cup cucumber, thinly sliced
- 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
- 1/2 cup red onion, thinly sliced
- 1/2 cup radishes, thinly sliced
- 3 tablespoons fresh dill, roughly chopped
- 2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
- 1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese (optional)
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
- 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
- 1 teaspoon honey
- 1 small garlic clove, minced
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Make the dressing. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the olive oil, white wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, and minced garlic until emulsified. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.
- Prep the vegetables. Wash and dry the greens thoroughly. Slice the cucumber, halve the cherry tomatoes, and thinly slice the red onion and radishes.
- Assemble the salad. In a large bowl, combine the greens, cucumber, tomatoes, red onion, and radishes. Scatter the fresh dill and parsley over the top.
- Dress and toss. Drizzle the dressing over the salad and toss gently to coat all the vegetables evenly. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
- Finish and serve. Top with crumbled feta if using. Serve immediately while the greens are crisp.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 120 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 10g | Carbs: 7g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 160mg