The Battle of the Salads

A couple of days ago, Ron mentioned at the dinner table that he wouldn’t be home for dinner on Tuesday. There was a Christmas party for his division at a country club, so he would be there through the dinner hour. That meant I would have to pick Bethany up from basketball practice, and she and I would eat dinner by ourselves.

My first thought was “Where could we go out to eat?” After thinking it over for a while, that option had three downsides: the expense, the fact that it would be hard to stay within my Weight Watchers points for the day with a restaurant meal, and the time involved—it might not have left Bethany enough time for her homework. Oh, and there was the fact that she would be wearing her gym clothes when I picked her up… not exactly the kind of outfit you wear into a restaurant.

Sometime this morning, probably when I was doing the mostly-mindless task of sorting $100 in change into piles to be counted (trying to come up with enough money to pay for tomorrow’s Pepsi order), I came up with an idea: Bethany and I would make salads for dinner, post a picture and description on Facebook, and have people vote on whose salad looked tastier. Sounded like a good idea to me, but would Bethany think it was hokey?

When I picked her up from practice, she had a funny story to tell me… so I didn’t get to bring up my idea until we were pulling out of the school parking lot. She knew something was up by which way I turned… we weren’t going home the usual way. As soon as I told her the idea, she was all in.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and wandered through the produce section. I told her she could pick up any fruits or vegetables she wanted for her salad. We got a cucumber, some romaine and butter lettuces, and some tortilla strips (although the croutons were considered for a while). Fresh blueberries were on sale, so I picked up a little container of them (just in case I wanted to get really adventurous with my salad), and I had a coupon for a 12-ounce Odwalla beverage, and they were on sale, so I let Bethany pick out one of those. I almost bought a bag of seedless red grapes, because they looked so good, and they were “on sale”, but when the produce scale showed that the bag would cost $10, I put them back. We had a great time at the self-checkout, paying for $12.89 groceries with all coins. (I figured it would be easier to “buy” the nickels and dimes than to try to get them all stuffed into coin wrappers. I had about $20 in coins in my purse!)

The ride home was fun… Bethany was planning her salad, and doing a bit of trash talking… how she was going to win, hands down. She was having more fun with this than I imagined.

So, here are the finished products:

Bethany’s salad, on the left, has cucumbers, sweet banana peppers, black olives, feta cheese, tortilla strips, grape tomatoes and a crumbled Gyro patty, with Greek dressing. My salad has alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, blue cheese, chicken, slices of Bartlett pear, candied pecans, and strawberry vinaigrette.

So, who do you think won the “Battle of the Salads”? Place your vote with a comment below… I’ll tally the votes next Wednesday morning (December 21^st). We haven’t figured out what the winner actually wins, other than bragging rights.