Spring Recipe: My Favorite Chopped Salad

This is honestly my favorite salad ever.  Packed with fresh veggies, healthy, crispy, delicious.  I’ve said this many times before, if you can boil water and have the patience to chop a shitload of vegetables, you can make this salad (or a variation of it). The key? High quality vegetables.  This recipe replaces my old favorite chopped salad recipe. Here’s how to make it:

Try to get your hands on some fresh vine ripe tomatoes, sometimes Jumbo has it in stock, if not, cherry tomatoes will work just fine too.

Grill up some sweet corn. Salt it to make it extra sweet.

Some lovely peppers can be tossed into the mix, I like to add a variety to make it extra colorful, but sometimes yellow is hard to fine in BA.  Make your own pepper bar and roast half of them.

Chop up some cucumber and palmitos, put it on a plate with the tomatoes for no reason, just because it is oh, so pretty in the picture.

Fry up some bacon (if you have the luxury of using turkey bacon, I’d recommend that), and place it in a bowl.

Then finely chop up some iceberg lettuce in very small pieces, toss in the basil and chop that up to.  Then dump it all in a wood bowl, add the chopped veggies, and mix it up!

I made a simple garlic and red wine vinaigrette to dress the salad, but really your favorite recipe will do.

Ingredients
– Head of lettuce
– Big giant’s handful of basil
– Red, yellow and green peppers (Save a few for roasting, here’s a recipe how to  roast a red pepper)
– Tomatoes (cherry and/or regular)
– Cucumber
– Hearts of palm (palmitos)
– 2 ears of sweet corn
– Bacon

Roasted Red Pepper and Garlic Vinaigrette (adapted from Food.com)
2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic (crushed)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
1/4 cup chopped roasted red pepper

Directions:

1. Finely chop up iceberg lettuce and basil, set aside.  Then start chopping up all the rest of the vegetables in tiny baby-bitesize pieces.
2. Fry up to bacon (or turkey bacon), set aside and once cool chop it up
3. Boil corn, then sauté those babies in a tiny bit of butter
4. Roast the red pepper, chop it up about 1/4 cup for the salad dressing
5. Whisk up the salad dressing combining olive oil, red wine vinegar, crushed garlic, roasted red pepper, sea salt, and fresh ground pepper

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