Food Preparation Adventures

Today's homemade lunch was a salad. Salads are hard to mess up.

This is a spinach salad with tuna (Starkist tuna pack), grapes, pineapple, walnuts, celery, bell pepper, mandarin oranges, a dash of red pepper flakes and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar.

Didn't use salad dressing because each ingredient has enough flavoring on its own and the vinegar and flakes took the edge off the spinach. The dominant flavor was whatever was in that particular bite. I'm not a fan of salad dressings for salads with flavorful ingredients. Especially, ranch dressing. After all the stuff I put on this salad, topping it off with ranch dressing would have been like taking a giant shit on it. If I want ranch dressing, I'll drink it straight from the bottle.

I'm not a foodie but ranch dressing is wrong for most occasions. It drowns out all other flavors. It is salad dressing version of glitter. Glitter is the herpes of crafts.

Ranch dressing is appropriate for salads consisting of nothing but iceberg lettuce, a bit of red cabbage and some carrot shavings. This is not a salad but a dressing delivery system. It provides a good excuse for consuming a lot of ranch dressing without drinking straight from the bottle because either the bottle is unavailable or you're with people.

I also prepared my own yogurt - Dannon plain yogurt with frozen blackberries (thawed by lunch time). I wanted to cut down on my sugar intake and save some money.

Yes, there is two cups of spinach under all that.

The numbers for this lunch: 548 calories, 84 g carbs, 16 g fat, 40 g protein, 530 mg sodium, 1,576 mg potassium