Winter salad

Because I grew up in Southern California and the West Coast of Florida, to me "a vegetable side dish" means salad.  This is very different, I have learned, from what many mid-westerner's think of as a veggie side.  It's not that I don't eat cooked veggies - in winter we have to.  All of our garden veggies are frozen and waiting to be cooked into some sort of wonderful dish with herbs and garlic.  But I still crave the salads.  That's why I grow the lettuce and arugula in the basement and the sprouts in the window in our kitchen.  As I was making my salad for dinner tonight it struck me how different my salads are in winter versus the rest of the year...they just lack the color!

Here's a spring salad:

And here's a winter salad (ignore, if you can, the size difference - in summer a salad is really not a side dish but a meal):

I have frozen peas from the spring garden sprinkled over, but there's no color.  So now I'm wondering if I can grow violas under the lights in the winter.  That would make such a cheery change to the winter salads!

I think I'm going to try it.  I've already tried to grow just about every other possible thing in the basement in the winter (think sub-arctic plenty tomatoes, radishes, peas, nasturtiums...all failures), so why not violas?  Time to get the seeds out...