Super Simple Arugula Salad

Late August. The end of summer approaches and I can feel it in the light — the angle shifting, the evenings arriving a few minutes earlier each day. Portland summers are so perfect that their ending feels personal, like a friend leaving without saying goodbye. I hold on to the last peaches, the last tomatoes, the last evening walks where the light is gold and the air smells like warm concrete and blackberries.

I made a peach and shiso salad this week — ripe peaches from the farmers market, sliced thin, laid over arugula with torn shiso leaves, a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds, and a yuzu vinaigrette. The combination of sweet peach and herbaceous shiso and the bright acid of yuzu is a late-summer psalm, a prayer to the season before it turns. I wrote about it for the blog and the post was simple and untroubled, just the recipe and the light and the taste, and sometimes the simplest posts are the best posts because they let the food do the talking and the writer do the listening.

I have been working on the food magazine essay in the mornings while Miya is at a little summer camp — three hours a day, art and music and "outdoor exploration," which is mostly digging in dirt. Three hours is enough to write. Three hours is enough to be a person who is not a mother, who is just a woman at a kitchen table with a laptop and a cooling cup of tea, making sentences. I write about Fumiko. I write about miso soup. I write about the way the kombu unfurls in water like a memory releasing itself. I write about the tamagoyaki pan, seasoned black, irreplaceable. I write about Sacramento and Portland and the distance between them, which is four hundred miles by car and zero miles by dashi.

Brian took Miya to his parents' house this weekend. The Callahans — Eileen and Patrick — are good grandparents: loud, warm, reliably stocked with cookies and opinions. Miya loves them with the uncomplicated love of a child who doesn't yet understand that grandparents come in sets and her sets don't match. The Callahans are noise and laughter and beer. Ken is silence and daikon and tea. Both are love. Both are insufficient alone. Both are what she has.

I used the Brian-free weekend to write and cook and practice yoga and sit in the quiet of the apartment in a way that felt less like loneliness and more like reconnaissance — studying the terrain of a life I might soon be living full-time. A life without Brian in it. The terrain is unfamiliar but not unfriendly. There are mountains in the distance. I think I can see the path.

The peach and shiso salad I described above started, as so many of my best meals do, with a base of good arugula — that peppery, honest green that doesn’t ask much of you and gives so much back. At its heart, it’s a super simple arugula salad, and I want to give you that foundation here, the one you can dress up with whatever the farmers market offers you in these last warm weeks. Those three quiet hours each morning, writing and thinking and occasionally just sitting, taught me again that the simplest things are often the most sustaining.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 2

Ingredients

4 cups fresh arugula, washed and dried
1 ripe peach, pitted and thinly sliced (or substitute with shaved Parmesan or halved cherry tomatoes)
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds or pine nuts
1/4 small red onion, very thinly sliced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice (or yuzu juice if available)
1 teaspoon honey or agave
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Make the vinaigrette. In a small bowl or jar, whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, honey, and Dijon mustard until emulsified. Season with salt and pepper and set aside.
Prep the greens. Place the arugula in a wide, shallow serving bowl. Scatter the red onion slices over the top.
Add the toppings. Arrange the peach slices (or your chosen topping) over the arugula. Sprinkle the toasted sesame seeds or pine nuts evenly across the salad.
Dress and serve. Drizzle the vinaigrette over the salad just before serving — start with half and add more to taste. Toss gently at the table so the arugula stays light and airy. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Super Simple Arugula Salad — The Late-Summer Psalm I Keep Coming Back To