Butter Lettuce Cups with Seasonal Vegetables

The lettuce is the plate. That is the whole idea here. You find butter lettuce with leaves so tender they fold around whatever you put inside, and then you fill them with whatever looks most alive at the market that morning.

I have made these cups a hundred different ways depending on the season. Spring brings peas and radishes and the first tender herbs. Summer offers shaved summer squash and cherry tomatoes still warm from the field. Fall might mean roasted beets and persimmons. The vessel stays the same. What changes is what the land is giving.

This is not a recipe so much as a way of thinking. You start with perfect lettuce, the kind that costs a little more because someone grew it with care. You add vegetables cut thin enough to eat raw, dressed with nothing more than good oil and citrus. You let things taste of what they are. Every meal is a meaningful choice, and this one says: I went to the market. I paid attention. I brought home the best I could find.