I don’t know if you’re like me, but I have a lousy diet. Just awful. Fast food and microwave is the way I roll, baby. However, I do love salad, and I try to eat it for lunch a couple times a week. But, because it’s homemade, my salads tend to be on the basic side.

Recently, I’ve been trying to jazz things up, without getting too Martha Stuart. I thought I’d share my latest experiments.

Tortillas in Salad

This one sounds weird, but I have got to tell you, I just turned an ordinary salad into something a lot more hearty and satisfying. We’ve got some fresh, white flour tortillas in the fridge. They were so nice and sotft, I wanted to eat one, but didn’t want to deal with a wrap or get out last night’s leftover ground turkey burritos.  Inspiration struck! I ripped the tortilla into bit sized shreds and lined the bottom of the salad bowl with them. Then I layered my spinach, carrots, mozzarella cheese and turkey on top.

The result? Mmm! The fairly bland tortilla chunks were mellow and soft and added a nice texture to the salad, along with some extra calories which should hopefully keep my from starvation later this afternoon.

The next logical step, of course, would be to turn the tortilla strip salad into a full-on Mexican themed salad with a blend of spicy Mexican cheeses, peppers, tomatoes, maybe some salsa, etc. If any of you try it, please let me know!

Thanksgiving-themed Salad

Okay, so this was my it’s-November-let’s-make-a-Thanksgiving-salad idea. And I thought it turned out very yum! This would be a great after Thanksgiving salad to use up those leftovers. I made this for one person, but you could expand it to serve more.

What you need:

• 1 small Microwavable baked sweet potato

• Mixed green salad, pre-washed and ready to eat

• Turkey, either deli sliced or shredded Turkey meat (or Thanksgiving leftovers!)

• shredded cheese, Mozzarella (or whatever cheese you fancy)

• mushrooms & pre-washed baby carrots (or whatever extra fixin’s you’d like. Walnuts would be a nice touch)

• dressing, like raspberry or cranberry vinagrette

• dried cranberries (optional)

Bake your sweet potato according to directions. Most groceries stores now carry ready to bake, wrapped potatos and sweet potatoes. They usually take about 6 to 8 minutes to bake on high in the microwave.

While it’s baking, throw in a generous portion of greens, carrots and mushrooms into a bowl. Add the cold turkey meat and cheese, and whatever additional toppings you’d like, such as walnuts or dried cranberries.

When the sweet potato is done, remove wrapper and let cool. Cut off the ends and discard. Then cut sweet potato in half, and remove skin. Cut the sweet potato halves into cubes, and let cool. Then toss in the salad.

Finish off with your favorite vinaigrette dressing (I, however, just used extra virgin olive oil as my dressing, because I ran out of anything else!). I haven’t seen cranberry salad dressing in stores, but I know there are recipes for it online. I’m sure any vinaigrette-type dressing would be yum. I’d steer clear of things like Ranch and Blue Cheese, however.

If anyone tries any of these ideas, I’d love to hear or see.

Karyn