Do We Ever Love A Salad Bar

 My husband and I really enjoy salad bars! It is a great dining out option for us as Dave is not Vegan, I am, and we both love a salad bar and it caters to both our tastes.  We do not go out to eat very often, and when we do we usually go to our local Pizza Hut as they have a decent salad bar. A nice salad and a glass wine makes for a pleasant outing. Unfortunately on a recent trip to Pizza Hut we found that the cost had increased significantly and there were fewer choices available on the salad bar, it was disappointing. We were pretty shocked at the cost of our salad and will probably not go again.

Instead we decided to do our own salad bar at home. In last weeks grocery order I got a Romaine salad mix, cucumber, tomatoes, purple onion, frozen peas, chick peas, pickled beets, roasted pumpkin seeds (most stores now call them Pepitas), and croutons for Dave. We had pickled banana peppers, green and kalamata olives, and eggs as Dave enjoys hard boiled egg on his salad. I prepped everything and set out our "salad bar" and we were all set. And a day or two later we enjoyed our salad bar again. And it was a delicious, yummy meal at a fraction of the cost of eating out. 

I made some soup to go with my salad. It is a simple soup to make, a couple of quarts of water, a quart of veggie broth, throw in some veggies, I added onion, sweet potato, cauliflower, purple cabbage, kale, collard greens, mushrooms and garlic. Added a heaping teaspoonful of ginger and tumeric and a shake of salt and let it cook. I used an immersion blender to puree it a bit. It was delicious with a nice sprinkling of nutritional yeast on top. Between the soup and salad I was pretty well fed for the entire day!