Salad

The weekly struggle between eating healthy and just eating anything that is around never ends. Basically eating healthy comes down to

1. learning how to throw random stuff in your pantry and fridge together
2. buying random stuff to leave in your pantry and fridge

Last night, we had a very unhealthy frozen chicken pot pie, mini-quiche and popcorn chicken meal. Thanks Costco for giving us such great convenience food. They were all amazingly tasty.

To balance that, I made a salad. Thanks to Costco again for providing most ingredients again! It's a good and bad place. You can buy 5 baby romaine heads in a bag and a box of frozen popcorn chicken.

Ingredients

Salad
a few handfuls of spinach
a few stalks of romaine lettuce
cubed tomato (much as you want)
finely diced red onion (much as you want)
two small handfuls of pecans, toasted
one handful of dried cranberries
finely diced ham
[whatever protein, lettuce, veggies, crunchy and sweet things you have on hand]

Dressing
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2-3 teaspoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon finely diced red onion
grapeseed oil

Instructions

1. Put together all salad ingredients except ham.
2. Saute ham in a little oil until slightly crispy. Cool slightly and put in salad.
3. Saute red onion briefly until softened.
4. Pour in cider vinegar in red onion pan.
5. Heat up vinegar and add brown sugar.
6. Leave at low boil until slightly thickened. It will boil down a bit.
7. Remove from heat and cool if you can wait.
8. Add grapeseed oil to vinegar when it cools down slightly.
9. Shake dressing mixture and add to salad.
10. Grind some pepper if you like.

If you have some great dressing, you can finish at step 2. That's even better. I had no idea where the balsamic vinegar was and no other dressing so I had to improvised.