"Chef Salad"

Upon my return from Germany, Dear Husband had an excellent idea for dinner: "chef salad." He had planned the week's menus so that I wouldn't have to cook while I was getting over the jetlag, and because our local farmers market offers so much wonderful produce--and then a friend had a bumper crop of garden lettuce--I have continued to include it in our rotation of meals for the summer. Now, the typical chef salad contains hard-boiled egg, meats like ham, cheeses like cheddar, and some veggies. In our household the term "chef salad" encompasses any entree salad, preferably although not always containing at least two of the classic ingredients. The really nice thing about our "chef salad" recipe is that the concept is so flexible: greens + toppings + protein + grain. The kinds we make tend to involve quite a bit of prep, so we usually fix these together. Here is a representative sampling:

lettuce, tomato, green pepper, carrot, radish, cheddar cheese, half a hard-boiled egg each, and a piece of French baguette


You can see my favorite mustard: 3 Monkeys sweet and spicy, which we discovered on our anniversary trip to Madison, WI, last summer.








This salad comes with a salad!


Greek salad: tomato, cucumber, feta cheese, olive oil, and dried oregano and basil


Entree salad: mixed greens, chunked ham, club crackers


(Sorry the photo is so blurry--I must have been in a hurry to eat!)

Next we have two variations of the same salad, because DH wanted to keep his tuna fish separate:

lettuce, tomato, carrots, cucumber, cheese, raspberries, pine nuts, whole-wheat roll, tuna fish drained and mixed with mayo and (in my instance) topped with sweet relish, because there is no other way to enjoy tuna fish


The cat was happy because he got to lick the extra tuna fish from my finger twice!


I generally don't use salad dressing, but I thought the French dressing on DH's salad made for a lovely combination of reds and oranges.

Instead of mustard, he ate his roll with raspberry jam (not pictured).


With chef salad, everybody can have his or her favorite condiments. Other popular toppings include grapes, blueberries, walnuts, strawberries, almonds, and sweet or dill pickles.

What do you like to put on your "chef salad"?