A Successful and Healthy Salad and Special Access to Great Photos

I attended a pot luck lunch the other day and my job was to create a salad. Here's the recipe I invented. It was a big hit:


1 cup sliced strawberries
1 cup blueberries
1/2 cup Fairpoint Organic Sugarfree Dried Cranberries
1/2 cup finely chopped Vidalia onions
1/2 cup Jeremiah's Cherry Wood Smoked Blue Cheese
Food Club Tortilla Strips
Old Cape Cod Raspberry Salad Dressing
Lettuce, torn into forkable pieces

The strawberries came from California, but the blueberries were from Val Sousa, a farmer at the NRT Farmer's Market. Fairpoint runs the organic cranberry bog on Bay Road and also sells at the Farmer's Market. The sugar free cranberries are covered with apple juice before drying and make a much better snack then Ocean Spray's Craisins. The lettuce came from my own garden.

I mixed the berries and onion in a tupperware container before going to the lunch. I then tossed the remaining ingredients together at the pot luck and served. One participant in the pot luck is allergic to nuts so I used the tortilla strips for a little crunch and found it an improvement over walnuts or pecans. Old Cape Cod Raspberry Salad Dressing has sugar as a main ingredient, but a lot of raspberry dressings have nut oil so I had to avoid them. The Old Cape Cod Dressing did an admirable job melding the flavors.

You might have heard about color matching to make salads. Each color fruit or vegetable comes with its own mix of antioxidants, vitamins, or other positive nutrients. Red comes from lycopene. In the body lycopene plays a role in protecting the skin from sun damage and has been shown to have some effect on reducing the risk of heart disease and asthma. Black and blue fruits get their color from anthocyanins and have been shown to increase cardiovascular health and prevent short term memory loss. Researchers at Tufts believe blueberries may even promote the growth of new nerve cells and help the brain respond better to incoming messages. Cranberries and blueberries have long been known to prevent bladder infections as well.

Despite containing some saturated fat the cheese in the salad is an important source of protein. Protein should be included in most salads, but especially in salads that are being used as a summer meal because protein gives the body a long feeling of fullness. It also turns out it costs the body on average about 10 calories to digest a 100 calories of food, but it takes 20 to 35 calories to digest a hundred calories of protein compared to about 6 calories per 100 calories of fats or carbs. Thus, protein gives you a big discount when you are dieting.

If you have a MacIntosh computer, one of the big events of recent weeks has been the opening of the App Store for grown up computers. The App store was originally created by Apple to  sell mini-programs for the IPhone and IPad. At any rate the store gets deeper and deeper by the day. Yesterday I discovered an series of Apps from Marc Rochkind that has organized all sorts of old photographs into easily searchable categories. Many of these shots are available at the Library of Congress, but trust someone who has used that site, it's not user friendly. The most significant collections are  the thousands of photos taken by Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn (and a couple of othe less famous photographers) for the Farm Security Agency during the 1930's and early 40's. These are classics of American photography. Here's an example:

This is a Ben Shahn shot of a blind beggar selling newspapers outside a grocery store in 1935. How can you not love a photo like this that shows the great determination of the subject and yet is also composition of great artistic merit.  You can look in the reference section of the App store for Marc's apps or you can visit his own website here.