My Favorite Salad

Just a simple grilled steak salad. Heavy on the steak. :) No real recipe because it's just a salad, but this is my favorite. You could just as easily serve the steak with a salad on the side, but what's the fun in that? ;)

Preface: My husband practically cremated my steak, but I still love him. Sorry for the chopped off photo up there....The other two I took were blurry for some reason. Random.

This is a total convenience meal for us. I didn't even make my own croutons or fry up the bacon. Done this way, it goes together, including grilling the steak, in less than 20 minutes (assuming your grill is hot, and allowing time for the meat to rest before you cut into it....).

I usually mix baby spring mix with baby spinach....but I went to not-my-usual grocery store and found something called "half and half mix"....which, as the label described it, is baby spring mix and spinach mixed together. haha! Awesome. So I used that this time around. :)

So....half and half mix, tomatoes, cucumbers, bacon, croutons, grapes (do you SEEEEEE those blueberry-sized grapes? How utterly adorable. If you find bigger ones, you might cut them in half...I normally do), cheese (which I could give or take, but the husband's gotta have it...LOL!). The only thing missing is sunflower seeds, but it's just as good without them if your husband munched all of yours and didn't tell you before you went to the store.

Just grill the steak to your liking (I prefer mine Medium....my husband totally cremated it....don't be like my husband. LOL!), and fix the salad how you want it...add dressing (blech), if you must, put the steak on top and eat it. :) I usually drizzle a very very small amount of olive oil on my salads just to make all of the smaller 'stuff' stick to everything else, because otherwise I wind up with a plate full of bacon and cheese and sunflower seeds after the salad is gone....not that those last few forkfuls aren't utterly amazing....but, it just feels wrong to miss out on all that yumminess throughout the rest of the salad.

So yeah. Quick, simple, no-brains-required dinner....one that we eat a few times a week, either with grilled chicken or grilled steak.

Chicken Taco Salad

In a word, NOM!

Everyone in my house loves green salad--even my super finicky 8 year old with severe feeding issues will eat salad, so we usually have some variation of a salad as a main course 3-4 nights a week. This is one of our favorites.

The chicken is very similar to my crock pot taco chicken. I basically do the same thing, but instead of salsa, I use a large can of diced tomatoes (you could totally use 2-3 cans of Rotel) and a bag of frozen Southwest mix veggies. I also use lime zest instead of a tangelo peel for this.

The salad is nothing special. Whatever greens that are on sale--romaine, cabbage, arugula, butter, green leaf, baby spinach, just whatever you like; tomato, onion, cucumber, etc. etc. etc. Just make a salad. ;) You could totally serve this on top of tortilla chips or even in a tortilla bowl if you're in the mood. I normally don't, though. Toss a handful of cheese on top and a spoonful of the chicken and you're good to go! My husband tops his with salsa and sour cream.