Only recently did I hear about this newfangled kind of salad called a “chopped salad”. My sister-in-law (well, ex-sister-in-law, but she lives with my mom so who’s keeping track and I love cooking with her and respect many of her culinary opinions) brought me some from her second job and I loved it and I usually don’t much like salads. I thought at first that it was just the name of the salad, but Jill expained to me that it was more the method — everything was chopped up and you ended up eating more vegetables than you would with a big fluffy girly salad. It made sense.

More recently I looked up “chopped salad recipe” and found many recipes, but Wikipedia redirects it to “Cobb Salad”.

So the other day I took a head of romaine, some radishes, part of a cucumber, part of an onion, part of an avocado, a few grape tomatoes and chopped the hell out of them. I added some ready-made dressing and served it to Dean for dinner (with something else of course — he’s a guy after all). We both loved it.

Thinking about it, though, this is not new. My mom made chopped salad when I was a kid except she used iceberg lettuce. Years later, I remember scolding her for cutting the vegetables too small when she was making a salad in my kitchen.

Strange how things come back around. We even have a restaurant in the area called Chop’t that specializes in chopped salad. It’s good. I’ve been there but didn’t put it together until I searched for chopped salad on good old Google and Chop’t was the first link.

So now, instead of serving fancy baby lettuce / spinach greens with walnuts, cranberries and goat cheese with a vinaigrette dressing I just chop up a bunch of vegetables and actually enjoy what I am eating.