Salad with lettuce, Jerusalem artichoke (topinambour), and bean sprouts

When you think about it, fall and winter are the best seasons for organic lettuce salads. In the summer, it's too hot to grow the varieties favored by most people, around here anyway. A recent Weekly Pannier presented us with a fine head of lettuce that was so big and so fresh that we were eating on it all week, for lunch and dinner. One day, at lunch, I was running late with the dish I was preparing (I don't recall what it was, an omelet, maybe), so Juliette had to rush to get a salad assembled. The result, quickly done, made a sparkling picture of freshness at the table, so I grabbed the camera and snapped a shot.

Jerusalem artichoke, which is called topinambour in Catalonia, stays fresh in the frigo for a long time, if you keep it in the vegetable cooler -- in a brown paper bag, we've been told. Just wash one of the tubers and scrub it well, then slice it onto the lettuce and sprouts, which have already been tossed together in a serving bowl. To my taste, the thinner the slivers of topinambour the better (and Juliette agrees), so I use a very sharp vegetable peeler. I like the nutty flavor that the topinambour brings to the palate, but even better is the flavor of other ingredients which the topinambour soaks up in an instant and gives back with such grace and style. And from such a humble tuber, amazing.

On this particular day, Juliette whipped up a quick dressing of garlic puree mixed into some soy sauce (or was it tamari, I can't remember). A salad like this also invites creative application of oils à table: olive oil, for sure, but we also keep a bottle of five-oil mix on the table, which gives us lots of good omega threes and sixes: sesame, colza, walnut, evening primrose (onagre), and cannabis (chanvre).

The Jerusalem artichoke is no artichoke, by the way, nor does it hail from the Holy Land, so we stick with the common name around here, topinambour.

This vegetable is not truly an artichoke but a variety of sunflower with a lumpy, brown-skinned tuber that often resembles a ginger root. Contrary to what the name implies, this vegetable has nothing to do with Jerusalem but is derived instead from the Italian word for sunflower, girasole.
BBC Good Food