Lettuce is a big part of our diet. We grow lettuce in the garden. We put it in our salads, along with other fresh goodies. I love to go out to the garden and pick stuff to eat. I can breathe deeper out in the garden. I like to check on the growth of the plants, checking the zucchinis, cucumbers, pumpkins and tomatoes, looking for even more bugs on the broccoli and wandering around in general.

I bring the lettuce inside and strip the leaves off the core. Then I rinse them and wash them in a bath of cool water in the kitchen sink. After that, I soak them in a fresh, deep, cool bath of water. I let it all soak there for a while, whilst I prepare the other components of the salad. I let it soak there for twenty minutes or more.

This ritual of stripping, rinsing and preliminary soaking rids the scrumptious lettuce leaves of unwanted dirt and bugs (of which there seems to be many!). The final soaking process rejuvenates the lettuce and makes it crisper and fresher. The water brings the lettuce back to life, so it seems.

We store the rest of the lettuce for the next meal. After soaking it, it stores really well in a tightly-sealed container in the fridge. It keeps crisp and fresh for a couple of days, if it lasts that long before being eaten!

This post was brought to you by Rebecca at Fangorn farm dot com, who is on holidays and finds the idea of soaking lettuce very intriguing.