Salad Greens

Main-dish salads, especially those that work hot or cold, add flexibility to a cook's schedule. If you have time, you could make this dish before work and have it waiting when you return home. This recipe uses Japanese soba noodles, made of buckwheat and wheat, which add heft to an entree salad. These are sold in many supermarkets, as well as ethnic and specialty stores. (However, spaghetti noodles will work just fine.) Likewise, if you can't find hoisin sauce, 4 tablespoons of soy sauce can be used in place of the hoisin/soy combination.

Eating a radish requires a leap of faith. With its sharp, biting reputation, it doesn't invite timid appetites. Yet a radish's plump shape and vivid color are so tempting, it's hard to resist. Fortunately this root vegetable's charms outweigh its pungent nature. And radishes offer so much variety that if one type is too potent, you can find another that is more to your liking. Cherry Belle is probably the radish you're most familiar with. The bright red globes, ranging in size from a nickel to a silver dollar, deliver snap and crunch in the white-fleshed interior.

There was a time when our concept of the salad green was pretty much limited to iceberg lettuce: We'd top it with a wedge of tomato and a slice of cucumber, ladle on the French or Thousand Island dressing, and voila -- the perfect salad. But times have changed. Today, the simple salad green has grown up, keeping pace with increasingly sophisticated and multicultural American palates. Besides iceberg, there are now dozens of varieties of salad greens, ranging from familiar spinach, endive and romaine to gourmet varieties, such as tat soi (pronounced tat soy)

As if on cue, into the Chiapparelli's restaurant server's station steps a busboy carrying a plastic salad bowl large enough to bathe a Rottweiler, filled to brimming with lettuce - iceberg lettuce. Head waitress Ida Talucci was just saying: "Iceberg gets a bad rap." Another one of these immense salad bowls sits off to the side, empty but for stray iceberg remnants, a little red onion and tomato shiny with the residue of oil and vinegar. Just before noon on a Tuesday one load of iceberg lettuce has already been served and another load is about to be, which must say something about what a dicey thing it is to say what is or is not a trend.

With the abundance of summer's fruits and vegetables, it's easy to conjure up delicious, healthful, low-fat summer salads. But low-fat salads can become high-fat disasters with the wrong dressing.Traditional dressings are loaded with oil. Typically they have two to three parts oil to one part acid. When you try to reduce the oil, you find it contributes more than just taste. Without oil, the dressing is unbalanced and becomes pungent and overly tangy. When you cut back the oil, the acid -- usually vinegar or citrus juices -- must be reduced as well.

As the holidays near, I prepare to gather Christmas greens.Let others deck the halls with boughs of holly. The greens of my dreams will be piled on my plate beneath an avalanche of French dressing. It's salad greens that I crave, garden-fresh vegetables to celebrate the carving of Big Bird at Christmas.My greens should be ready to harvest by then.Forget plummeting temperatures -- the spinach is thriving in the back yard. Despite howling winds, I sleep undisturbed as visions of lettuce leaves dance in my head.

My cold frame and I have an on-off relationship: We are buddies in winter and strangers in summer.Just call us foul-weather friends.For six balmy months, I've given my cold frame the cold shoulder. Oh, I passed it daily on my way to the garden, but I never stopped to chat. Too busy. There were flowers to cut and vegetables to harvest from the main garden. So I ignored the sturdy little garden box that had sheltered my tender seedlings on frosty spring nights.Now, as the big chill approaches, I am starting to cozy up to the cold frame again.

It happens every June: the invasion of the salad greens. Those little seeds that seemed so inconsequential back in April when you scattered them on the moist garden ground have now come to life, and with a vengeance. This year the combination of abundant moisture and relatively cool days have produced lush crops of lettuce and other greens. Even if you don't grow your own, the mounds of lettuce and its verdant relatives that appear at area farmers markets are signs that is a good season for salads.

If Marie Antoinette were still around, she'd say, "Let them eat iceberg."But we demand our mesclun. Our red romaine. Our frisee.You want a revolution? You got one -- in the produce section, among the salad greens. Fancy greens are shoving aside plain old iceberg for room in the everyday salad bowl.In produce aisles of most supermarkets, iceberg shares space with Belgian endive clusters, bunches of arugula and all varieties of salads-in-a-bag.The revolution's coming at us from two sides. On the gourmet front, supermarkets have begun to sell exotic greens -- such as nutty, buttery frisee -- in those little plastic packages.

Each day of the week offers a menu aimed at a different aspect of meal planning. There's a family meal, a kids' menu aimed at younger tastes, a heat-and-eat meal that recycles leftovers, a budget meal that employs a cost- cutting strategy, a meatless or "less meat" dish for people who may not be strict vegetarians but are trying to cut down on meat, an express meal that requires little or no preparation, and an entertaining menu that's quick.Shopping ListWhat you'll need for this week's menus (consult recipes for exact amounts)