Hi Friends! It’s another Tasty Tuesday, and I’m sharing a hearty chef salad!There is nothing quite like a delicious chef salad on a hot summer night! It fills you up with good hearty ingredients. Yet it also keeps you cool! Some salads will leave you feeling kind of hungry. Not this salad! You will feel full and satisfied! And it’s just so pretty!

I did want to show you the bowl I’m serving the salad in. It is melamine.  I bought this a few weeks ago at Pier 1, and it is on sale right now for $12.49 and you can also get it in a bright green, blue, yellow, white and I believe a sand color. I love fun and pretty dishes, so I just thought I would share it.

Ok, and now let’s begin!

Ingredients:

• 1 head of Romaine lettuce
• 1 cucumber
• 1 small red onion
• 1 small container of cherry tomatoes
• 1 small head of broccoli
• 1 small bag of cubed cheese (I chose Colby Jack)
• 6 hard boiled eggs, quartered
• 1 package of bacon, cooked, drained and chopped
• 1 lb of deli oven roast turkey (I asked for mine sliced thick for cubing)
• 1 lb of deli ham (I asked for mine sliced thick for cubing)
• salt and pepper

Start by washing and chopping your lettuce.

Place in your serving bowl. Season with salt and pepper

Cook your bacon, drain on paper towel, and chop.

Slice the red onion (I used a mandolin) and then quarter the slices.

Clean and slice a cucumber (I used a mandolin on the thickest setting) and then cut the slices in half.

Cut your broccoli into small flowerets.

I cut the slabs of the meat in strips and then cubed it.

And then you start putting your toppings on your salad. I put them all on in rows, and just before serving, I toss it.  You can see here, I got fancy and put the sliced cherry tomatoes around the perimeter with some in the center. Ooh la la!

I served it with some sides of fruit (watermelon and red grapes) and some nice bread on my Michigan cutting board!

Time to toss that salad… I’m hungry, and this salad smells fantastic!

Here we go!

Serve it up! Yes! That is perfect!

We are eating like kings tonight!

What really knocks this salad dinner out of the park is the abundance of really fulfilling hearty ingredients. Turkey, ham, boiled eggs, cheese, bacon, so many hearty additions you don’t feel like you are missing out on anything! And the cool crunchiness makes it the perfect way to end a summer day!

It’s funny how our bodies crave good healthy sustenance. If we came home at the end of a long day and there sat a big plate of doughnuts with the sugar dripping off of them, well it might look good. But those calories would be empty, and there would be nothing there to sustain us. We would end up feeling shaky and weak. But protein like in this salad gives us some real coal for the furnace!

This hearty salad reminds me that we need something much more in our lives than just the “grind” day in and day out. We need people. We need relationship. Just as our bodies get depleted, we need to recharge with people we care about. And sitting down at a meal and breaking bread together is the perfect time to do this!

I hope you have a fantastic week!

I’ll be back Friday for another post!

Love Always,

Amy

“People, People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”  (from the song “People”) by Barbara Streisand