Salad time again

Last year, about this time, I decided I would blog the “salad days of summer” based on a previous summer’s experience that I wanted to duplicate. That summer, I ate a salad a day – sometimes very healthy fare, sometimes not so much.

Green salads ranged from lettuce, celery, cucumber and a lite dressing to the other green salad, the one my grown children asked for at Christmas, which includes lime Jello, pear juice and cream cheese. Fruit salads varied too, from strawberries and blueberries in a bowl to a selection of various melon balls, pineapple, strawberries, and assorted other fruits and berries, soaked overnight in a lime/rum mixture. Once, after taking this salad to a staff meeting, I came upon one young lady holding back the fruit with the serving spoon while pouring the “dressing” into a cup!

Some salads were complete meals, some just tasty sides. Some combinations were delicious; some didn’t bear repeating, but all in all, it was fun, tasty and I came up with some new and interesting salad recipes that I thought might be nice to share. So, last year I started out all ready to blog a similar experience. However, a repeat performance was not to be. After about two weeks of occasional blogging about lettuce salads with different dressings, I gave up. Salads just were not happening.

So, this summer I’m not going to be fanatical about it, but if the odd salad recipe shows up, don’t be surprised. Tonight we’re having a favourite, original invention. It evolved from a fridge-emptying experience several years ago. The original was macaroni, grated cheddar, ham, celery and onion with a light mayo dressing. Now, I use shell pasta, grated cheddar, a large chicken breast chopped into small pieces (still warm), celery, purple onion and sometimes sweet red pepper. The dressing is a generous amount of light mayo mixed with a tablespoon of Dijon, salt and pepper and thinned with milk. Easy and tasty. Never quite turns out the same twice – maybe I should measure?