Salad with ramp vinegar dressing (One Local Summer week 4)

Salads seemed like easy and natural meals that could be made with 100% local ingredients. After all, salads are flexible enough to include many different vegetables. And salad greens have been plentiful lately—I heard one farmer tell someone that all the rain we've been having lately has been very good for lettuces, though not as much for strawberries and cherries.

Where I was getting stuck was with the dressing. Oil is allowed in the challenge, but I needed a local acidic ingredient to mix with it. I'm sure I could have gotten away with using store-bought vinegar, but I managed to find ramp vinegar from a farm in West Virginia (Bigg Riggs Farm). Now, I'm sure that the vinegar they used to make this was store-bought as well, but it just seemed a little more in keeping with the challenge. Plus, I've never had ramps before. The purchase even seemed predestined since the vinegar expires on my birthday in 2011.

I started with a salad mix from my favorite produce vendor at the Mt. Pleasant farmers market, Tree and Leaf Farm in Loudon County, VA. I added some diced red onion, halved cherry tomatoes, sliced hard-boiled eggs (still warm from the pot, my favorite way to eat them), and some chopped sweet Italian peppers (which I actually thought would have a bit of a kick, despite being called "sweet," simply because they look like banana peppers, but no luck).

The dressing was very simple—three parts olive oil to one (more like 1.5) part ramp vinegar, plus salt and pepper. It was very flavorful despite the simplicity of the ingredients because of the oniony/garlicky flavor of the ramps.

You can see more pictures here, including a shot of the eggs before they were hard-boiled. One of them has a bluish-green shell! The vendor told me which kind of hens lay eggs of that color, but unfortunately I forget. Anyone know?