Salad Season

Tis the season to lose all that F-in' weight. To that end I'm eating salad. Eating salad doesn't have to be lame, it can be fun! Here is a combination I've been perfecting for the last few days. It's a hybrid of a magazine recipe and my memory of a salad that used to be on the menu at Outback. It's 290 calories, and really yummy. So yummy that I only require 3 Ritz crackers to get it down, not my usual 5.

Here's the formula:

• a pretty big but not huge bed of romaine or red-leaf or whatever you like
• 1 whole green onion, thinly sliced
• 2 1/2 ounces turkey (I like mesquite smoked from the deli counter sliced thick)
• 5 artichoke hearts, chopped
• 10 grams of feta, crumbled (bleu cheese would be great too)
• 6 candied almonds, chopped
• 2 Tablespoons (32 grams) Kraft raspberry vinaigrette with poppyseeds

The raspberry vinaigrette makes it really special. (Thanks Lucy for putting that on my brain.) Candied pecans would be better, but I recently inherited a vast quantity of candied almonds.