Variety is the key to great salad every day.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Marietta O'Byrne shares the salad dressing recipe today that her friends ask for often. She normally mixes the dressing by eye, but she measured the ingredients this time so the recipe would be correct.

"It's a good, basic salad vinaigrette and you can fool around with it," she said, suggesting variations in her recipe that include a dash of balsamic or fruit-flavored vinegar, summer herbs or kalamata olive spread.

O'Byrne and her husband, Ernie, operate Northwest Garden Landscape & Nursery at 86813 Central Road, west of Eugene.

O'Byrne cooks using fresh vegetables and berries from her garden, chickens (and eggs) that she raises on an organic diet, and lamb produced by a neighbor.

Specialty: "From scratch, organic, and efficient timewise," is the way she describes her cooking.

"I have to organize it. I can't do Julia Child recipes, you know, really involved and long, because I want to be outside in the nursery or work in the garden. I get itchy if I'm inside too long."

How she began cooking: "I grew up in a formal household where my mother never cooked. The housekeeper cooked. But my father loved good food," she said.

Envision post-war Germany, she said, where an avocado is considered totally exotic. Her father would leave their home in Hamburg and go on business trips.

"And he would come back and bring a bundle, wrapped in damp cloth, of herbs: dill and chervil and stuff. It would be unwrapped like some gift of the gods," she said.

"And he was the first one who liked grapefruit - that was exotic. Only the parents got to eat the grapefruit, the kids could look. Those were different times, you know?

"He would try everything from pig's ears to I don't know what we all had, but we had to try everything.

"As a child, you weren't allowed to say, 'Oh, I don't like this.' You just ate what there was. And if you weren't finished, you sat there for two hours and ate it.

"But in a way, it taught me adventure in cooking," she said. "I like to try different - I don't shy away from other cultures and strange foods."

When she came to the United States as a college student, however, her greatest shock was the "balloon bread" that was commonly sold then.

Her reaction was: "That's bread? But you can squeeze it! You can take this thing and make a little lump out of it. How can you eat this stuff?"

O'Byrne said she didn't start cooking until she entered college and was living by herself.

"And then, of course, I tried to cook what I grew up with but since I hadn't really cooked as a child, just watched, I had to sort of reinvent the wheel."

O'Byrne said the mother of her first husband was a great inspiration.

"She lived very organically up in Big Sur (California), beautiful country, and she always baked bread. And she had real bread you had to slice! Delicious whole-wheat bread," O'Byrne said.

"She was the first person that I met that cooked real food the way I liked it. She had this vegetable soup she would make every day, and she would bake this bread. So I learned to bake bread from her, and that was sort of my first source of inspiration.

"And I baked bread until the bread got so good here that I figured I don't have to anymore. For like 30 years, I baked bread twice a week, so I think that's where it started."

Her biggest cooking success: "I asked my husband that. He said, 'Oh, salads, talk about salads,' ' she said.

The O'Byrnes eat some type of salad almost every day.

"It's sort of like our basic food," she said.

"That's what we miss most when we go into other countries, except Europe. If you go to India or some exotic country, they don't have green salads. You know, other Americans miss hamburgers. We miss our daily green salad."

Her biggest cooking failure: It was a meat and spinach stir-fry that she prepared back when her children still lived at home.

"At the end of the stir-fry, you have it all done and then you add a little sauce - vinegar and a little water and a little sugar and, I think, garlic and a little bit of cornstarch to thicken it," she said.

"So I was doing that and the cornstarch just didn't work right. It just didn't thicken. So I figured the cornstarch is old, something is wrong with it. So I made a little more water and cornstarch, and added a little bit more. It still didn't do it. So I added a little bit more a third time. It still didn't thicken."

Thinking that something was wrong with the cornstarch, she decided the family would just have to eat the stir-fry with a thin sauce. But a taste of the dish brought exclamations of "Oh, what did you do?" from her family.

"I'd used powdered sugar instead of cornstarch," O'Byrne said, explaining she had mixed up the glass jars in which she kept the cornstarch and powdered sugar that she bought in bulk.

"And I was very thrifty in those days. 'Aw, it can't be that bad. Come on, eat it,' ' she told her family.

"But after a couple bites, I admitted it was chicken scratch."

Her favorite cookbooks: "Chez Panisse Vegetables" by Alice Waters (Harper Collins) and "Your Organic Kitchen" by Jesse Ziff Cool (Rodale Press).

Why this recipe was chosen: "Because we eat it every day and it hasn't grown old on us," she said. "I've been doing this since we were married. That's 25 years."

For storage, O'Byrne recommends you wash whole heads of greens, spin them dry and place them loosely in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.

"It keeps really well that way," she said. "And then when you want to make a salad, you don't have to wash the lettuce and go through it all over again."

She varies her green salads by adding such things as mango, avocado and grapefruit sections, black oil-cured olives and feta cheese (tell guests the olives contain seeds and don't overdo the feta), pan-roasted pumpkin seeds, roasted pine nuts, pomegranate seeds or daikon radish to the greens.

"What we don't care for much are carrots and apples," she said, adding that a little celery may be OK.

Basic Salad Dressing

1 cup extra virgin kalamata (dark green Greek) olive oil

3 1/2 to 4 tablespoons Chinese vinegar (milder than Western)

2 cloves garlic, mashed

2 tablespoons well-aged tamari 

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon dried oregano 

1/4 teaspoon dried basil

Ground black pepper to taste

Mix ingredients together in a nonreactive container.

"This is just a basic recipe," O'Byrne says. "A dash of balsamic vinegar can be added, or a fruity vinegar. In summer, I use fresh tarragon and thyme, sometimes a teaspoon of kalamata olive spread. Adjust the vinegars so it doesn't get too acidic."

Note: Because there may not be enough acid in this dressing to neutralize the bacterial spores that cause botulism, the OSU/Lane County Extension Service recommends you play it safe by refrigerating the dressing and using it within three weeks.

To nominate a cook for this feature, mail it to Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; send a fax to 338-2813; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363, or [phone]; or send an e-mail to [e-mail]. Include your name and phone number.