We're spending 30 days digging into groceries—how to shop for them, where to shop for them, and what to do when the lady in front of you has more than 12 items in her basket. For the complete series, click here.
There are so many reasons to celebrate the arrival of spring and the beginning of the fresh produce growing season. Spring mix—those bagged or boxed mixes of "tender baby lettuces"—is not one of them. The name alone is an insult to one of my favorite seasons. So this spring, I'm on the campaign path to get everyone to step away from the spring mix display at the grocery store. Why? So many reasons:
There's no one formula for what constitutes a packaged spring mix, but it's usually a mix of baby romaine, oak leaf lettuces, and some other random leaves. These boxes and bags are available year-round, cranked out of greenhouses or far-away warmer places that can continually reproduce baby greens that would otherwise only be harvested in the spring.
Maybe it's the puritanical New Englander in me, but I feel like I can taste the life force of spring in the first locally harvested baby greens of the season. And boxed spring mix has none of this.
Would you eat Christmas cookies and hot chocolate year round? No, it'd ruin the novelty and the fun of it, right? Ditto for baby lettuce—especially the bland, watered down baby lettuce of the packaged spring mix—it gets old so fast when it shows up on your plate year round.
Those anemic, flimsy leaves in packaged spring aren't strong enough for how I like to eat a salad: they wither into slimy wisps as soon as a vinaigrette touches them. And forget trying to toss them with a thicker dressing like green goddess or ranch—you'll clobber them.
Dressing-induced slime aside, spring mix is also prone to get slimy in the box or the bag before you even bring it home from the grocery store. Those delicate baby lettuce leaves are also more likely to get banged up in transit than their heartier cousins. Who wants to open a clamshell of seemingly fresh salad to discover banged-up, slimy greens?
I like to be able to crunch on my salad, or at least feel a little resistance when I bite down on a leafy green. No such luck with spring mix, whose flimsy little spineless leafs leave me wishing I had bought a crisp head of little gem instead.
There's watercress. And pea shoots. And sorrel. Or mâche, baby tatsoi, or mustard greens. There is, in fact, a huge, wonderful, flavorful world of fresh baby spring greens at farmers' markets right now—you just have to think outside the box (and the bag) to find them.
