Chef Salad

Chef Salad

Last weekend was a busy project weekend for my husband and me. Grace, our most mischievous cat, had decided to play in our homebuilt lightbox. By play in, I mean she jumped inside, clawed two of the three tissue paper diffusers to shreds and jumped out through the third.

Granted, our old lightbox was basically a cardboard box with tissue paper sides. Not much and it was definitely cheap. We'd known for a while that we really should redo it; we'd both been getting frustrated with its limitations. We just didn't have a reason to do it.

Grace

Thanks Grace. (You can see how innocent she is.)

While we were looking for a small dry erase board for me, my husband saw foamboard and had an idea for a lightbox. He designed it, modeled it and came up with the parts we'd need. The next day, we went to our local hardware store and picked up all of the parts we'd need.

It worked out fantastically well. I'll post a tutorial on how to make it later this week, but it blows the doors off of our old cardboard box. I wanted to share two of our test shots with you, just for the hell of it, which is why today's recipe is pretty basic.

Plus, after fighting with writing and rendering illustrations so we could explain it to others resulted in pushing dinner to just before bed, we needed to eat quickly. We still wanted to have a healthy dinner though. Enter the chef salad.

A chef's salad, at least to me, is a jumble of a salad. I usually make it with whatever leftovers are hanging out in the fridge that need to be used up. (I also do this with fried rice.) I have my favorite salad toppings that I usually put on too. They're a main course, so make sure you throw on plenty of veggies and enough protein to satisfy. The best thing is that these salads are terribly easy to throw together, only requiring some basic chopping of ingredients.

Chef Salad - Test Shot

Chef Salad [printable recipe]

  • Spinach
  • 1/2 cup shredded carrot
  • 1/4 cup shredded cabbage
  • 1 hard-boiled egg per person
  • 1/3 cup diced cooked turkey
  • 1/4 cup cooked great northern beans
  • 1/2 oz cheddar cheese, cut into small chunks
  • 1 huge crimini mushroom, chopped
  • 12 black olives, sliced
  • 2 green onions, chopped
  • 5 sun-dried tomatoes, sliced
  • 1 tbsp roasted sunflower kernels
  • 1 tbsp roasted, salted soy nuts

Combine everything in a large salad bowl or individual bowls. Toss with your favorite dressing.