sparkler's notes

Enjoying the bright sun and finishing off the book I am reading, I ate a Greek salad for lunch outside today. Before you go running to check the date, yes it is October, and there were no tomatoes in this Greek salad to speak of. This is what I loved about it. I realize this in not a “proper” Greek salad. There were all the other typical ingredients: red onion, olives (bit skimpy on these), red bell pepper, feta cheese and one addition shredded cabbage. People are so sneaky with cabbage; it gets thrown in for color all over the place. It is the decorative pillow of vegetables. All these ingredients and I didn’t have to endure out-of-season tomatoes. Crunchy romaine lettuce was the capable understudy to the missing starlet tomatoes. Hooray for Trader Joes for doing without as opposed to filling in with what some places try to pass off for tomatoes, but so clearly are not. When you can’t have the real thing, sometimes it is just best to do without.