Gary creates a weekly salad and eats it for dinner, lunch, and sometimes breakfast. He's very creative. This is the recipe for a typical salad.
The base is a pre-made Chicken Caesar salad from Dierberg's. This accounts for about 20% of the finished salad. Then Gary layers on the items detailed a year ago in this post: blue cheese dressing, feta cheese, Parmesan, croutons, grape tomatoes, plus red, yellow, and orange bell peppers. And croutons.
Last week, though, he started with a base of an Applebee's chicken /strawberry balsamic salad, which had a completely different flavor profile. Gary tasted it after he had doused it in the dressing and cheese and stirred in the peppers, and felt that what it needed was a smattering of white grapes and Mega-Omega Trail mix.
Because walnuts, mango, almonds, cranberries, and pumpkin seeds and grapes match so well with balsamic vinegar and blue cheese dressing. Not to mention that I had already portioned out 30 grams of this trail mix and added exactly five chocolate chips to each tiny snack baggie.
He chewed on it for a day until he finally had to say that a salad of chicken, blue cheese dressing, feta, Parmesan, croutons, grape tomatoes, grapes, bell peppers, croutons, walnuts, mango, almonds, cranberries, pumpkin seeds, and chocolate chips was not tasty.
He fixed it by mixing in another "normal" salad and thus diluting the trail mix / fruit salad flavors. I must say, this salad obsession makes me glad that he didn't stick with his pledge to cook for us in his retirement.
Oh. Oh dear. Some of that I could see having at least a chance of going together, but... oh dear. Glad you don't have to eat it!
Posted by: KC | July 10, 2022 at 01:41 PM
KC - there's a reason why walnuts show up in salads and whole almonds don't. They slide right off when you try to chew them.
Posted by: theQueen | July 11, 2022 at 07:48 AM