Late summer salad

One word distinguishes late summer salad: Tomatoes.  Heirloom tomatoes are the best, bought ripe from a farmer's market if you can.  They taste completely different than anything from the supermarket and I'm pretty sure they're what older people are talking about when they say, "tomatoes used to taste completely different when I was a kid." 

A trip to the new Fresh & Easy at Vanowen and Sepulveda yielded some huge, dried lima beans, dried minced onion, dried minced garlic and bay leaves for the only cooking I'm up to at this time of year: boiling water.  I soaked a cup of lima beans in about 4 cups of water overnight in a mixing bowl.  Today I boiled them for 1.5 hours along with a few shakes of the onion and garlic, 1 bay leaf, a couple of baby carrots and a shot of canola oil, which reduces the foaming created by the starch in the beans. 

I set a timer, walked away and came back to beans that taste like large, well seasoned baked potatoes -- pasty and delicious over a salad (it should be said that our small child ate a bowl of them -- the spicing is subtle).

The rest is all quickly dumped into a bowl: tomatoes, raisins, walnuts, baby carrots, bagged Spring Mix salad from Trader Joe's, and Follow Your Heart's (vegan, but not low fat) Thousand Island dressing (sold at Whole Foods as well as the restaurant in Canoga Park). 

My mother dropped over some of that amazing La Brea Multigrain Bread they sell two loaves at a time over a Costco (about $4.50).  What a delicious meal after a day of frightwig-level humidity.

If you hit the farmer's markets now, be sure to look for cantaloupe, as it's finally in season and really at its best (and cheapest!).