Recipe #12 - Spinach Mandarin Poppy Seed Salad

I am a girl who really loves her salads, but I'm not found of the blah bagged lettuce mix plus a tomato option that many restaurants serve as a side salad.  When I am served one of these, I want to say, "Look, I know that you opened a bag of lettuce (with little carrot slices), grabbed a handful, and plopped a tomato slice on this.  This is not a $3.50 side salad.  Its bagged lettuce.  Where is the good stuff?!"

When a yummy salad recipe comes along, I hang onto to it, and this recipe is one of my new favorites.  You can't go wrong when the ingredients include bacon, mozzarella, avocado and mandarin oranges!  It is the Spinach Mandarin Poppy Seed Salad recipe found on page 76 of the cookbook and online here. 

There isn't a lot of prep work involved here.  I would suggest putting your bacon in the skillet to cook at the very beginning though.  That's the only thing that took some time.  Yes, I know that you can microwave bacon, but it just tastes better in the skillet (and so does my house).

Once your bacon is cooked, you basically just put all the ingredients in the bowl and toss.

 

I waited to add the dressing until the salad was on my plate.  I knew that we'd have leftovers, and when you already have dressing on it, salad gets all wilty and yucky.  I intend to eat this for lunch tomorrow too, so the dressing waited until it was plated.

Click here for the information on the dressing recipe I used, as suggested in the cookbook.

 

My husband's first comment was that this was a great "non-blah" salad.  It doesn't have any weird ingredients, but its not a basic garden salad.  It was perfect for a warm summer day, but I fully intend to eat this year round.  It would be great to serve company or bring to a potluck.

You may be wondering if my kids liked it.  Well my kids don't touch green salad.  Ever.  They did ask if they could pick the bacon out though.  And my oldest asked I would give him double dessert if he ate a small bowl of it.  First of all, we weren't having dessert, and second of all, I was grouchy and quickly answered, "No.  Eat it if you want, but we're not rewarding you for eating your dinner."  See, I'm grouchy.

After dinner, I disappeared into my room to finish reading my book and attempt to get my grouchies out.  Its too bad I didn't make dessert.  That probably would have helped my mood...