Friday Food Files With Molly Watson: Vietnamese Spring Noodle Salad.

Regular readers may have noticed that I try to eat pretty seasonally. Being a member of a CSA (we're members of Terra Firma, which I really like for the variety and year-long nature of their fruit harvest, among other fine features) sort of forces the issue. I mean, there you are with a whole pile of seasonal fruits and vegetables fresh from the field, what are you going to do, let it rot and go buy Chilean peaches in February? Maybe some people would, but not too many in these recessionary times.

Living in California also makes it easy. My CSA box this week had such a wondrous, seemingly summery variety in it this week that I nearly keeled over in amazement. In fact, it's so easy to eat seasonally in California and never feel deprived that I avoid talking about it with people from other parts of the country for whom eating seasonally involves 6 if not 8 months of root vegetables.

Some of the joy of seasonal eating for me is coming up with new twists on standard dishes. This Vietnamese Spring Noodle Salad is a lot like a regular old, standard-issue Vietnamese noodle salad - except it has spring onions, spring salad mix, and the only herb is springy mint (no basil or cilantro). The out-of-season element was the chile I used in the nuoc cham dressing, but if you wanted to get hard-core you could use red pepper flakes instead of fresh chile.

For me this salad is about the best of eating seasonally - it's not punitive, it's not doctrinaire, it just plain tastes good.

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Each week, the Friday Food Files are deliciously brought to you by Molly Watson. For more on Molly and her delicious recipes, you can visit her in one of many wonderful places:
Writer: mollywatsonwrites.com
Blogger: thedinnerfiles.com
Recipe Wizard: localfoods.about.com
Radio Girl: eatthatradio.wordpress.com

*Photos courtesy of Molly Watson.