Les Goodman (sous chef at John Ash) and I presented a miner’s lettuce, arugula, pickled beet and raw milk ricotta salad at USF’s Farmer-Chef luncheon. My sister Sarah and I picked 8.6lbs of miner’s lettuce the day before, mostly at Luther Burbank’s original experimental farm, along with a pound of arugula I grew at zazu farm. We talked farming and food with incredible chefs and farmers like Mark Dommen of One Market and Andy Griffin from Mariquita Farm. Les took the leftover salad back to John Ash and added it to the menu, where it promptly sold out. It’s easy to make fun of a plant that is so ubiquitous that many consider it a weed, but you can’t find it in stores, it is chocked full of omega 3′s, and it’s delicious.
We served 240 attendees of the USF hospitality management symposium. Lots of people had never heard of miners lettuce, or Claytonia, as it is know on the East Coast where it is grown as a greenhouse crop. It is one of the hardiest winter greens and it is also chocked full of Omega-3 fatty acids.
