Wilted Leaf Lettuce Salad

Second cutting started Thursday. Smaller crop — I expected this — maybe six hundred bales when it is all in next week. The grass came back hard after the storm but the heat through July took some out of it and the cool nights have not yet come to push the second growth. We will be fine. With first and second cutting and a third in September if we get one, I will have winter feed and a small surplus to sell.

Patrick had a fall Tuesday. Not bad — he was in the kitchen and his hip went and he caught himself on the counter and slid down to the floor, no break, no hit to the head, but he could not get back up alone and Mom called me from the kitchen and I came in from the corral and lifted him into a chair and he was angry the way he gets angry, which is silently, which is harder than yelling, and Mom and I stood there and waited until the silence had finished its work. He said, I am sorry. He says that more now. I said, There is nothing to be sorry for. Then I made him coffee and we sat at the table for an hour without speaking and that was Tuesday morning. He did not fall again the rest of the week. But the falls are starting to come. There will be more. The geometry of his life is shifting and the falls are part of the shift. We will adapt. We will install more grab bars. We will do what needs doing. I am trying not to project. I am trying to be in this week.

The book has been out a little over two months. The second printing is in stores. Sarah has started fielding requests for me to do small events — a reading at a brewery in Missoula, a panel at a Bozeman writers conference, a podcast in Helena. I have said yes to two and no to three. The yeses are short trips, single nights away, manageable for Mom and me to coordinate around Patrick. The nos are because I do not want to spend three days away from the ranch right now and because the requests do not pay enough to justify it and because I am, I have learned about myself, an introvert in ways the work of the farm has hidden from me my whole life. Public events take something out of me that takes a week to put back. I will do a few. I will not do many.

Cooking from the garden every night now. Wednesday I made a kind of summer minestrone with green beans, summer squash, fresh shell beans I had bought at the Roundup farmer's market on Saturday, tomatoes, basil, a parmesan rind I had been saving, and small pasta from the pantry. A summer soup. Mom loved it. Patrick ate it without comment which is approval. He does not eat what he disapproves of. He pushes it around. He approved.

Marcus came by Friday evening alone. No cookout planned. He just came. He sat on the porch and we drank iced tea and he said, I have not had a drink in fourteen days. The longest in a year. I said that was good. He said he was scared. I said he should be — being scared is part of it for the first six months. He said, You still scared sometimes? I said yes. I said the scared changes shape but the scared does not leave. He sat with that. After a while he said, Okay. Just that. Okay. He drove home. I went inside. I called Gary. Gary was already eating dinner. He listened. He said, Good. The ladder works. I said yeah. The ladder works because somebody held it. He said, Yeah, that is the whole point.

Sunday I cooked a roast chicken, the same roast chicken I always cook, the only roast chicken I will ever cook, the roast chicken that is more or less a hymn at this point. Whole bird, salt the night before, butter under the skin, lemon and thyme in the cavity, four-twenty-five oven for ninety minutes, rest fifteen minutes before carving, drippings into the gravy, leftover meat into a chicken salad for Monday lunch. Mom said it was the best one yet. She has said this every Sunday since 2019. It is not the best one yet. It is just Sunday chicken. Some things do not have to be best to be enough. The fire helps. The chicken helps. Helping Marcus the way I have been helped helps. The hay coming in helps. Everything that helps helps. I am thirty in four months. The work is the work.

The minestrone was Wednesday’s dinner, and it was good, but what I keep coming back to — the thing that sat the quietest and felt the most like this particular stretch of summer — was the wilted lettuce salad I made on Thursday, the way my grandmother used to make it, the way the hot bacon dressing goes over the fresh-cut leaves and everything wilts just enough without disappearing. It is garden food in the most direct sense: you walk out, you cut what is ready, you bring it in while it is still cold from the night. After a week of watching Patrick’s geometry shift and Marcus finding his footing and the hay coming in bale by bale, I needed something that asked almost nothing of me and gave almost everything back.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 10 min | Total Time: 20 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

8 cups torn leaf lettuce (red or green), loosely packed
4 green onions, thinly sliced
6 strips bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced (optional, for serving)

Instructions

Prepare the greens. Place torn lettuce and sliced green onions in a large heatproof bowl. Set aside.
Cook the bacon. In a medium skillet over medium heat, cook bacon pieces until crisp, about 7–8 minutes. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside, leaving drippings in the pan.
Make the dressing. Carefully add vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and pepper to the hot drippings. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar, about 1 minute.
Wilt the lettuce. Immediately pour the hot dressing over the lettuce and onions. Toss quickly until the greens are just wilted but not fully collapsed, about 30 seconds.
Finish and serve. Top with reserved bacon pieces and sliced hard-boiled eggs if using. Serve immediately — this salad does not wait.

Nutrition (per serving)

Wilted Leaf Lettuce Salad — What the Garden Gives You