Salads

While I was visiting my brother in Orlando last weekend, we went to some pretty cool restaurants. As I scanned the menus, I noticed that they offered an awful lot of salads with pretty interesting ingredients. Even though I'm a vegetarian, I almost never order salads as my main course. It's probably because I'm usually still hungry after I finish them due to the lack of protein. These salads, however, had nuts and a variety of cheeses that would probably solve that problem.

I made a mental note to experiment with it and ordered the three-egg omelet filled with veggies and served over home fries (I had just run 13.1 miles after all and I was starving).

So, last night, I decided to make a fancy cafe style salad at home. I started with baby romaine lettuce and added the following:

pecans
walnuts
dried cranberries
1/2 diced apple
golden raisins
onion

I then topped it with an excellent balsamic vinegar (this is one thing that you should definitely splurge on) and extra virgin olive oil. I hit it with some seasoning salt and gave it a taste.

It was rather excellent. I would have given anything for some Gorgonzola or some goat cheese, but I didn't happen to have any at the moment. I made a pretty big salad and I'm happy to report that I wasn't hungry again for 67 minutes. That's pretty remarkable for me.

My new mission this winter is to add one of these ingredient-laden, gourmet salads into my menu daily. They contribute heavily towards my 5 a day goal and I just feel better eating that much green stuff.