My Life

By Lynne Thompson

My Food

Great Greens

The greens in a salad usually serve as simply a supporting role for the veggies, fruits, nuts, croutons, dressings and meats topping them.

Not for Douglas Katz.

The owner of Indian-inspired restaurant Amba in Ohio City and Mediterranean eatery Zhug in Cleveland Heights, as well as chef partner at The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Provenance, makes greens the stars of his salads by tossing in the following: Fresh herbs. Katz generally incorporates whole leaves, sprigs and fronds “almost like another green.” He recommends tossing ½ cup of a single herb in a salad to serve four. The herb, he stresses, should match the flavor profile of the dressing. “If it’s an Italian dressing, you may use herbs…like Italian parsley or oregano or basil,” he says. “If you’re doing more of an Asian dressing, maybe you do a Thai basil or cilantro.”

Cabbages. Katz likes to mix green and red cabbages with iceberg lettuce or crispier counterparts like kale. “They hold up well to your salad dressings and add a great crunch,” he says. Bok choy and tatsoi leaves are perfect for adding to salads accompanying an Asian entree.

Swiss chard/ rainbow chard. Katz likes the mineral flavor and hardy texture chards contribute to a bib lettuce or a radicchio-and-endive blend. “They have a beautiful leaf,” he adds — an attribute that increases a salad’s visual appeal, as do the bright colors of the rainbow chard’s thinly sliced ribs.

Dressing to try: Stir equal parts tahini — Katz prefers the Seeds of Collaboration brand, available at Heinen’s grocery stores — and pickle juice. “I like more of a sour pickle juice when I’m making this dressing,” he says. It can be served as is or seasoned with everything from sumac to a favorite chili pepper.

My Earth

Flowers for the Black Thumb

The old saying “April showers bring May flowers” seems like an optimistic statement to those who swear they kill everything they touch.

Noelle Clark Akin, manager of training and education at Oakwood Village-based Petitti Garden Centers, provides a few examples of the many perennials that can survive a busy, bumbling novice gardener. The only musts: six-plus hours of sunlight and one inch of water once a week.

The purple coneflower. Akin praises this native perennial for its several cultivars, pest resistance, 5- to 10-day life span in an arrangement and interest its bird- and pollinator-attracting seed cone adds to a winter landscape. The newer varieties are branching and repeat blooming. “You cut a stem, and you get another side-shoot development,” she says of the flower, which blooms in midto late summer from seed.

Ornamental onion (allium). Growers have forced this flowering bulb, which is traditionally planted in the fall and blooms in the spring, into a plant garden center customers can pick up in May and watch bloom multiple times. All varieties offer a distinct advantage: “The deer don’t like it,” Akin says. “And the bunnies don’t like it.”

Oriental lily/Asiatic lily. Growers have also forced these bulbs into garden-ready plants. Akin describes the showy, hardy flowers as large, star-shaped blooms available in a rainbow of colors — even bicolored — that last for a long time in a vase. “The Orientals are very fragrant; the Asiatics are not,” she points out. Their only drawback: “The deer love them.”

English lavender. Hardy English lavender thrives in welldrained soil, raised beds and containers, although it takes at least two to three months to bloom from seed, according to Akin. She recommends planting seeds in late summer or early fall so plants can develop foliage and roots. “That next spring season, you should start to see flowering develop,” she says.

The water looks invitingly clean on a hot summer afternoon or evening.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

Dr. Claudia Hoyen, director of pediatric infection control and co-director of infection control at University Hospitals/Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, describes microscopic and