Chopped Salad with Ginger Dressing

My mom brought home this amazing ginger dressing from the grocery store last week and we are totally hooked. We made a chopped salad with whatever we could find in the fridge and feasted. We had some Romaine lettuce, so we chopped and cleaned it early in the morning to let it crisp up before lunch time. This was a wonderful hint that I didn’t know about. When you wash and dry lettuce and leave it in the fridge for a couple hours, it will crisp up and be nice and crunchy come lunchtime.

When lunchtime rolled around, we chopped up some cold cut turkey lunch meat, Monterey Jack cheese, white onion, green onion, tomatoes and cucumbers. We also threw in a handful of sunflower nuts (sunflower seeds without the shell) for some protein and crunch, and then we drowned the salad in dressing. It was yummy.  Cheese adds calcium, protein, Vitamin A and substance to the salad. The turkey and sunflower nuts both add protein.

The best part was that it was a healthy salad. And not healthy like… eating a salad and you won’t feel quite full and you’ll be hungry in a couple hours. No! This salad has so much substance because of all the goodies we found and threw in, we were full for hours. And it was so flavorful with all the bite-sized morsels. Once we finished we felt extremely satisfied.

Some other things we’ve thrown in: chopped cilantro, spinach (extra iron and vitamins A&C), Julianne Carrots, grape tomatoes from the garden, turkey bacon bits. You can top it off with any dressing, and toss before serving. If you are going to be taking the salad to work and eating it at lunch, package the dressing separately and toss just before eating. If you leave the dressing on the greens, the salad will wilt and will not be as crunchy and satisfying. I recommend a Tupperware with some extra room so you can add dressing, replace lid, and shake!