I've eaten a bunch of salads in my life. Growing up it was presented as the healthy choice to have as your meal, or at least with it. And I liked them too. Because I would go to a salad bar and load up the lettuce with ranch dressing, cheese, bacon, and croutons.
When I'm trying to eat healthy, I'll occasionally have a bagged salad kit, something like this. When I'm in the mood, it's fine, good enough.
But I saw these videos from Ethan Chlebowski: orzo salad and brussels sprouts salad. They gave me ideas for how to look at salad differently.
What I mean is this: What's the best part of a salad? It's not the lettuce. It's the stuff. So what if I made some salads that were all or mostly stuff, with barely any lettuce.
The day after eating nothing but chili cheese dogs seemed like the perfect day to find out.
(Incidentally, I had been stuck on the same weight number for over a week...until I woke up the day after eating nothing but chili cheese dogs and found that I had lost a pound, reaching a new low weight for the last 5 years.)
A lot of times I will at least use recipes as a starting point. But I'm very picky when it comes to veggies. I did browse recipes for inspiration of ingredients and basically made a list of all the ingredients that sounded good. Then I arranged them by flavor profile (Southwestern, Italian, American/Fruit, and some other random ideas).
First up: Southwestern. (I specifically didn't buy anything in bags. This was my first time ever buying heads of cabbage.)
Ingredients
charred poblano
red pepper
red onion
green onion
red cabbage
green cabbage
jarred jalapeños
jarred banana peppers
grated pepper jack
seasoned tortilla strips
cilantro
quick guac: avocado mashed with lime, salt and cilantro
dressing: lime crema (roughly 1/2 a cup of light sour cream plus juice from two lime wedges)
The only thing that gets cooked is the poblano, broiled for 10 minutes on high, rotating a few times. Everything else just gets chopped, diced, tossed in a big mixing bowl. It took 15 minutes to chop and prepare everything, so the poblano was basically room temp by the time I added.
This was going to be the primary picture:
Notice how it looks nicer, you can see the cheese and the cilantro. Well after my first bite I realized I forgot the guac. So I had to rearrange and take another photo (at the top of the post).
This was really good. So fresh. So filling. It might be hard to tell from the picture, but this is a fairly large mixing bowl. It's very heavy. Perfect for volume eaters. Here's a picture that shows the sense of scale.
And just for fun, here's a behind the scenes shot of my counter after I was done.
I had just come back from the store so there's an assortment of ingredients that I didn't use in this dish.
What I love about this salad is that it didn't feel like a cabbage salad with toppings. It felt more like a bowl you would get at Qdoba. I've got some other flavors to try out, but I know I'll be coming back to this one day.
As for calories, I tried to be sparing in the high cal ingredients like cheese, tortilla strips and avocado. I only used like 1/3 of an avocado.
This was never the kind of thing I was going to make for myself without this cooking series. But boy was this good.
This salad has four different peppers, two types of onion, two types of cabbage plus flavor boosters. So you can see that yes, I'm fairly picky, but still able to create a diverse salad despite my own limitations. If you liked tomatoes, black beans and corn, those would obviously be good additions. (I do like corn on the cob, but feel like corn has a tendency to overpower when it's in a salsa. It's like all I can taste.)
Most of the dishes in this series aren't specifically trying to be healthy. This one clearly is, but still tastes great. Another winner.
