Colorful Food

Current nutritional wisdom tells us we should plan our meals around the color pallet. There are certain vitamins an minerals associated with each of them. Variety ensures a healthy balanced diet. The tomatoes are what inspired my post for today.

The end result of this photo is one of my 5 Ingredient Salads. In this salad, each component can be as simple or complex as you'd like.

My LETTUCE mix today is red leaf lettuce, romaine hearts, sliced onion, radishes and chopped red cabbage for a nice crunch. Since I recently bought 10# of Vidalia ONIONS, they're showing up in a lot of my recipes right now. While this mix isn't just lettuce, lettuce is the base and the rest are compatible ingredients since they're all relatively dry. They can be mixed days ahead and the leftovers store well together. I chop and slice all of those, wash in my salad spinner, then refrigerate what's not used in the large plastic covered bowl that is the base of my spinner.

To the lettuce mix I add the remaining 3 ingredients. The only CUCUMBERS I buy are the long, skinny 'Burpless' English, Mini-English, or pickling cucumbers. So crisp and fresh tasting! I feel the regular dark green, smooth skinned common grocery store cucumbers, the 'Straight Eight' variety, are tasteless, watery, have horrible big nasty seeds and tough plastic-bag skins - ick!

In my opinion, the TOMATOES with the best flavor are the huge, big-shouldered, red beefsteaks. However, the ones for today are so pretty! The orange and yellow also are quite low in acid - if that's a concern for you. AVOCADOS are a staple in my kitchen and wonderful in tossed salads. Since they're the most delicate, I add those last.

The finished 5 Ingredient Salad is shown here with croutons and 3 salad dressing I make regularly - Recipes for all of the above were posted earlier. Happy Cooking. . .Be bold and creative with your colors! . . Lin