italian chopped salad

Greetings, vegans of the internet. I know. It's me again. I'm here to share yet another delicious recipe with you all. We're gonna riff off of yesterday's adventure and build our Italian chopped salad. This one is pretty basic, so no need to whip out your thinkin' caps.

Again, we're stealing this combination right off of Bravo!'s dinner menu, with a few slight modifications on my part. Namely, the omission of the olives and the feta cheese.

Now, as you've probably noticed, this blog is vegan. We don't do cheese here. We don't even really do fake cheese here (expensive). Part of committing to this lifestyle is learning to live with less, so you can become more. The olives are left out solely because I don't fucking like them.

Let's begin. We've got five ingredients on our list, and they are as follows:

romaine lettuce

cucumber

red onion

roma tomato

red wine vinaigrette (from yesterday, in case anybody forgot)

I'm gonna go ahead and leave the proportions up to you; this recipe is really hard to fuck up. My general rule of thumb is: lots of lettuce, and slightly less of everything else. The dressing does a lot of the heavy lifting for us in terms of tastiness. You could pretty much use any type of vegetable mix here, but in this case I prefer to remain true to the authenticity of the original.

What is it about fresh produce that makes it so sexy to look at? There's just something about the way it sits there that gets me going. Let's break down some romaine.

The lettuce is always chopped up pretty uniformly when you order it at the restaurant, so I'm going to try to do the same. I cut each leaf in half, hotdog-style, stack the halves, and then take a lap backwards, like so. Next, the cucumber.

All three of these components will be diced. Cut the cucumber lengthwise into slices, then long-ways into spears, and then from spears into small cubes. Dump 'em in. Chop the tomato and onion into the same shape. If your knife is dull, the tomato will be a bit tricky.

Once all of the ingredients are chopped and in a bowl, you're pretty much there. Like I said, this one is pretty simple. We've had a crazy first week. I don't want to overwhelm you. Life is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

Hold the phone. Aren't we forgetting something? That's right, our final ingredient: the infamous vinaigrette. You're going to want to wait until you're ready to consume before dressing this sucker; the longer the veggies marinate, the soggier they're going to become. The cucumber, onion, and tomato will generally be able to hold up under the pressure, but the romaine will wilt and release a lot of water, and that's just going to be a bummer. Swapping out the romaine for a heartier green (such as kale) will solve this issue if you're somebody who prefers a pre-dressed salad.

Squirt the dressing in. Give it a good toss. At long last, we've made it. The perfect Italian chopped salad.

This one is great for work. Share it with your friends. Let me know what they think. I'll see you guys tomorrow, same time, same place.