sensational salads

Since cookies have basically become their own food group for me for the past few days, I’ve tried to balance that out by eating lots of THESE:

Gorgeous much? Every day around lunchtime I assemble a salad bar with a variety of veggies, proteins, dips and the like, resembling something like this:

This one was quite yummy. Atop mixed greens and romaine tossed with a bit of homemade orange dressing there were shrooms, pickled eggplant, guac, white bean dip, fava bean dip, and tyrokafteri.

Heaven!

Lunch today gave me an awesome conundrum. So okay, my usual style of eating involves saving the best for last. BUT, today’s lunch was so uniformly awesome I couldn’t decide:

Along with the Chobs, I had a dipping plate:

Which was red pepper and carrot slices, fava bean dip, and more of Astra’s beer foccacia (I swear, I will never make another bread again. Girl is a champ!)

If I had, HAD, to pick, though, I think my favorite component was the salad!

 

Arugula, apples, and goat cheese dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, and freshly ground black pepper.

Oh em gee. Make this.

I also, as I am wont to do many many times every day, had tea. My house is cold, yo.

And my adorable mother made it (we both drink a ton of tea- we switch off making it- the kettle is almost always on- so glad we got electric!) and wasn’t sure if I wanted milk, so brought some on the side in this ridiculous antique serving dish:

Geez I am spoiled at home.

So yeah, despite the tons of salads I’ve had at home, I then went out to dinner and ordered salad. No picture (first date- that’d be just a LITTLE awkward) but it was at California Pizza Kitchen so I got one from their website!

Let the record state that their new Moroccan chicken salad is EXCELLENT! Bloggers favorite things- beets, avocado, red peppers, DATES, almonds, curry spiced chicken, lettuce and vinaigrette. Keerazy tasty!

And a nice guy. We then went ice skating and had hot chocolate AW. But to be totally honest, still miss The Boy. Too bad he turned out to be… ugh, whatever.

A final food thing of note- I have been LIVING ON NUTS. There are SO MANY OF THEM IN MY HOUSE.

I’ve been eating salted nuts, spiced nuts, candied nuts, praline-d nuts, honey roasted nuts, and, most recently:

Chocolate covered nuts.

A small, highly unrepresentative sample:

Yum! I am definitely, DEFINITELY getting enough monounsaturated fatty acids!