chopped salad

In an alternate reality somewhere I am at the gym working out and not writing this blog post while the oven preheats for the peach pie I just pulled out from the freezer.  I'm sweating and burning calories and generally looking fit.  But this is the real world and I am, in fact, a few moments away from getting up to place said peach pie into the oven.  I tend to go through cycles of caring about getting fit, which as we all well know is a common problem people have.  By no means am I a yo-yo dieter though.  Actually I am no dieter at all, other than the three months I was on Weight Watchers to lose the extra pounds I had accumulated while pregnant with Clio.  It was a breeze, mostly since I was breastfeeding (WW is the only diet program that I know of that has a plan for nursing moms) and it helped me get back to my pre-pregnancy weight.

The pie is now in the oven, by the way.

We don't eat too unhealthily in our house but we don't eat very healthily either.  Case in point tonight we had a very lean bean stew for dinner but we will be eating a piece of pie in a matter of an hour or so.  This is very typical of our eating habits; decent dinner followed by an indecent amount of dessert.  It is not something I particularly love about the way we live but most of the time I don't really feel motivated to change it either.  Leif and I don't have any vices other than that we really, really like dessert.  That folks, is a pathetic attempt at a justification.

On to the actual purpose of this post (You thought it was to bore you with my eating habits? Wrong!).  Chopped salad.  It is awesome, right?  I've eaten this particular salad three times in the last two days, which is why despite all that blabbering on above about eating poorly, I don't feel too guilty about eating the piece of pie that is in my near future.  I prepped enough of the components for all three meals at one time, otherwise I can tell you I would not have eaten it as often as I did.  Not because it isn't incredibly tasty, because it is exactly that, but because chopped salads take a lot of, um, chopping.  I'm not too fond of prep work (fancy people call this mise en place) and having to do this three times in two days would never happen.  Especially when I am generally interrupted by a certain toddler in order to voice one of her stuffed animals every 2-5 minutes.

If you can get past the prep for this salad -and it is not really all that bad I am just being a bit overdramatic- then you will likely end up loving it as much as I do.  It is filling without being heavy and it keeps me feeling satiated until dinner rolls around.  I would highly recommend you give it a try.  The best part of it is that you can customize it to fit your particular preferences very easily.  For instance, if you are not as cuckoo for garbanzo beans as I am, then sub some other form of protein like tofu or shredded chicken.  Don't have any grapes on hand?  Chop up an apple then.  An added bonus is that you don't even need to measure anything.  You can simply put in as much or as little as you desire.

For this particular chopped salad I used romaine hearts, red grapes (not seedless, thank you very much, I had to deseed these mofos), corn, cherry tomatoes, garbanzo beans, a hard boiled egg, and about 2 tablespoons of pepitas (also known as your standard pumpkin seeds but pepitas makes it sound much more exotic).  I am a sucker for Brianna's Poppyseed dressing but I only use a minimal amount with this salad because it just doesn't need it.  Plus, dressing is kind of crazy high in sugar content so I figure it is just as well to avoid using it a lot.  You could use any dressing you want though, I think goddess dressing or balsamic would also be great.

Let me know if you have any chopped salad combinations that are really amazing.  I intend to make more of these in the near future.

Pie's out of the oven!  Time to go.  Cheers!