Journal Entry
Week Eight
October 22, 2010
Rule 25 “Eat your Colors”
This past weekend, I went to a friend’s 22nd Birthday BBQ. As always, when invited somewhere, I try to offer to bring something, both to help the Host and as a way of saying “thank you for the invitation!” My Host mentioned that it would be great if I could bring a salad. Personally, I love salad – it’s so versatile and of course, really healthy. Knowing that this was a barbecue and many people would probably attend, I decided to keep this particular salad pretty simple so to appeal to a wide variety of tastes. I purchased some fresh spinach, fresh romaine hearts, fresh white mushrooms, and matchstick carrots. I took half of the spinach, chopped 1 ½ of the romaine heads, sliced the mushrooms, and tossed all with the carrots and put in a nice crystal bowl to make a pretty presentation. (Some of you may think that the crystal bowl was a little overboard for a salad at a backyard bbq, but if you know me, you’d expect that… I tend to make things really elegant :) Not as many people came to the bbq as were expected, so I was left with a lot of the salad to take home. Not that I minded; I had been meaning to get back to eating a salad almost every day, but have found that lettuce/spinach seems to go bad so quickly that I couldn’t eat it all in time and felt as though I were wasting every time I threw out half of it because it was rotted. (Although, Pollan would probably approve of my “eating food that will soon rot”)
Left with all of this extra salad (plus what I still had in my fridge that I didn’t bring to the bbq,) I’ve had to get inventive with my salad add-ons. For example:
Sunday’s Colorful Plate:
- Mixed greens, which included dark green spinach and purple cabbage
- Sliced red strawberries
- Dark Red Cranberries
- White Feta Cheese
Tuesday’s Colorful Plate:
- Dark Green Spinach
- Lighter green Romaine
- Orange matchstick carrots
- White/grey sliced mushrooms
- White feta cheese
- Dried fruit: Golden raisins, Crimson Cranberries, Purple Raisins, and Dark Brown Dates
- Sliced leftover Porkchop from last week’s cooking experiment, heated and served on top the salad
So far, the salads have been delicious and its been really fun to play with colors. I’ve heard that the more colors you eat, the wider variety of vitamins and minerals you are getting. And typically, I don’t eat salad dressing on my salads, usually the few add-ons that I put on top give plenty flavor.
I strongly recommend trying the Sunday Salad – those mixed greens with the sliced fresh strawberries? Sounds strange, but add nuts if you choose (I don’t like them, but the recipe called for them) and drizzle with a little pepperjelly vinaigrette – DELICIOUS!
Does anyone have any good salad ideas or recipes for a salad that you like a lot and care to share?
I love doing that with salad too. First, I hate it when you're trying to finish your spinach, but there's just too much of it and you can't eat it in time! Second, love putting strawberries on salad. I sometimes put apple and avocados are great too! Their sweetness really balances out great with the salad. I don't usually do dressing either expect a bit of S&P, oil olive, splash of balsamic vinegar, and if I'm feeling crazy a drip of honey mustrad.
ReplyDeleteApples sound delicious! And yes I know, I probably defeat the purpose of a "salad" by adding all the extras in so that I'm not left with just spinach on my plate, haha. I do make a conscious effort to add only healthy "extras," primarily extra vegetables. So I suppose that is okay. I like those little matchstick carrots and LOVE grape tomatoes in my salad as well!
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