I didn’t used to like salad very much, but then I realized: I don’t like iceberg lettuce at all, and Romaine lettuce only a little better. Now my salads are based on either baby spinach, or spring mix, or something other that’s more interesting.
Because I like my food well-distributed*, I usually start by cutting it smaller with a couple butter knives; if you do this after it’s all assembled, it can help mix everything together, too.
Dressings: there’s lots of good salad dressing out there, and on this eating plan you can get what you want as long as it’s low carb (my threshold is 2 grams of carbs or less per two tablespoons). Some of my favorites are:
- Balsamic vinaigrette: this is one of the few sweet-tasting dressings** with low carbs
- Caesar
- Ranch: and there’s some nice variations: bacon, 3-cheese, spicy, etc.
- Olive oil & vinegar
I am lucky to have a good cafeteria at work with a *great* salad bar, so I’ve accepted that on low-carb days I’ll be spending 6 bucks on lunch, and I choose my items carefully. Remember that when you’re eating from a salad bar you don’t actually have to have any lettuce if you don’t feel it that day… I’ll sometimes just get meat, cheese, red onion, a few seeds or beans, and top it with one of the aforementioned low-carb dressings. Pro tip: you can get enough make two meals out of it, especially if your eatery charges by the container as mine does. Eating less at lunch might help you stay awake better in the afternoon, too.
* I like my food better when I get some of everything in each bite. I detest poorly-made burritos where one bit is all rice, another is all beans, etc. And what’s the deal with croutons? When did we decide that croutons were to be the size of Volkswagens? I remember the days when they were small cubes of carb-goodness that would gracefully top a salad, and weren’t cubist absurdities that make the room shake when you accidentally drop one on the floor.
** I’ll talk more about this stuff in a future post, but you can make any dressing sweeter by adding Stevia, which is a blood-sugar-friendly sweetener that’s available in packets, or in bulk for cooking/baking. I like to try different condiments, and I recently bought some shawarma sauce that was just to tart, so I added in two packets of Stevia and shook it up good, and it’s much better now.
