Fresh and Nearly Free

People struggling with food bills often complain that vegetables are expensive and that they have to buy processed rubbish on their budget, so salads are beyond their means. Given that a 1kg bag of carrots at Sainsbury's cost me 90p the other day, that is at best moot. Carrot sticks, grated carrot, and various cooked carrot salads - though these tend to need spices - and all for pennies.

Even better is salad grown for free, or very nearly. Not everyone is lucky enough to have land for growing salads. But this simple alternative is possible for just about everyone.

You can buy seed trays from Wilkinson's very cheaply, or if you have left over plastic trays (with drainage holes in the bottom) from bought fruit and veg you can use them. A bit of compost to fill it to within about 2cm of the lip. Buy a seed-pack of peas (the best are sugar snap and mange tout but ordinary Feltham First etc would be fine), push the peas a cm below the surface, add a little water, and if the tray is near a source of natural light - the kitchen window, a bedroom windowsill... and they are kept just moist not wet, within a week or so you have peas shoots ready to pick - just the end couple of leaves and the little wispy tail between them, but as you will have planted 100 or more peas you will have plenty. This is cut and come again, so another few days and you have another little crop. In all you can rely on three crops, four if you are lucky. then root out the remains, refill the tray and start again - you should get two plantings from a pack of seed-peas.

Two days ago we had a salad of two boiled eggs with a tiny bit of mayo and two spring onions cut into rings, served on a bed (how chefy) of pea shoots with just a sprinkle of salt and a few drops of oil. The shoots had been cut about 5 minutes before we ate them. Simple, quick, fresh, cheap.

Completely free would be the dandelion leaves growing on what should be our lawn. I feed these to the chickens at night, but in France salade de pissenlit - pissenlit translates as wet the bed, referring to the diuretic properties of the leaf (in Welsh likewise I believe one name - forgive the spelling - is pi-pi in gwelli) - often appears on country restaurant menus. The leaf is slightly bitter but very tasty. It's high time I tried a full salad foraged from our garden - dandelions, wild garlic, maybe a few rose petals, the hop shoots from a plant curling up a tree... Watch this space.