Works For Me Wednesday: Shake 'Em Up Salads

An obvious part of our family's quest this year to eat healthier was to eat more salads. Surprisingly, me being the veggie-lover, gets bored quickly with salad. But I knew it was important nevertheless, and so I've found ways to make salad interesting, and come up with a variety of different tastes.

1. My husband's nighttime snack: a bowl of lettuce topped with salsa and a bit of shredded cheese.
2. After a taco dinner, I'll use the leftover chicken or ground meat for taco salads the next night.
3. My current favorite: an all-leaf lettuce salad, with a handful of cherry tomatoes, a bit of vinegar and oil and a sprinkle of rosemary-garlic dipping spices (You know those mixtures you can buy to add to oil for bread dipping - works great on salad).
4. Of course there's always the chopped salad: lettuce chopped fine with as many veggies as you can come up with - mushrooms, celery, tomato, cucumber . . .
   
5. Caesar salad: Romaine or leaf lettuce topped with grated parmesan cheese. Ken's Steakhouse lite Caesar dressing or Northern Italian lite dressing both go well with this.
6. Speaking of dressing, it helps to have a variety on hand. I used to be a one-dressing girl (we MUST use this entire bottle before we open another) but at any given time you'll find at least 3 different bottles in my fridge, and there's always vinegar and olive oil within reach.
7. For an oriental flair, mix in mandarin oranges and those crunchy noodles. Someone makes a yummy lite ginger dressing that works well with this (never bought it but someone keeps a bottle at work and we all enjoy it).
8. For a Greek spin, toss in some black olives, cucumbers, tomatoes and feta cheese.
9. Sometimes when I indulge in the salad bar at work, I'll make a little chef salad, lettuce with some turkey or ham, green olives, hard-boiled eggs and a bit of cheese.
10. I've been making spinach salads for us this summer. With or without chicken, the baby spinach salads is a nice change from lettuce. All you need is a few sliced mushrooms and hard-boiled egg. I do use bacon if I have the time, but the hot bacon dressing I use is pretty light (email me if you'd like the recipe).
11. Believe it or not, dried cranberries, toasted pecans and feta cheese make wonderful mix-ins!
    

As you can see, salads now take center stage on our dinner table. I splurged and bought an Oxo salad spinner, which has really made it easy to keep lettuce nice and fresh and ready to go. Occasionally I'll make a dinner out of salad by adding meat to the options above - taco salad, caesar salad, etc. Actually I've found that just about all the gourmet salads that you pay $9 for at a restaurant (doesn't that just kill you! - the only one worth it to me is a steak salad) can be recreated without meat at home.

So if you're dragging your feet in the salad arena, shake things up a bit! It works for me! Be sure to check out all the other great WFMW at Shannon's site.