There’s something about salads that usually makes me turn my nose on them. I imagine a limp green salad with shredded carrots and tasteless tomatoes tossed with a generic salad dressing. I’m sure it’s a remenant elementary school memory where the principal at the time made me take a bite of salad that resulted in me throwing up moments later. But just recently I discovered my love of big salads – big hefty salads with huge chunks of flavorful proteins mixed with fresh, crisp greens (no iceberg in sight). One of my favorite salads at this moment is a BLT&C: bacon, lettuce, tomato with chicken with a creamy homemade blue cheese dressing.
This salad is big enough to satisfy even the most Brobdingnagian appetite. The ingredients can easily be substituted with ones your choice, like avocado. But the piece de la resistence is the homemade blue cheese dressing. It’s so simple and easy that it will have you reconsider buying bottled salad dressing again.
Now for the giveaway— OXO graced me with two salad dressing shakers: one for me to keep and another for one lucky reader. With a recloseable top and wide mouth for adding ingredients, it’s a simple way to mix, serve and store homemade dressing. No additional bowls for mixing needed!
To win a shaker for yourself, leave a comment below and tell me your favorite salad before Monday, July 16 and I will randomly select one person.
Good luck!
Using Random.org, number 8 was selected. Congrats, Cathy! Please email me your address and I’ll get the shaker out to you ASAP.
Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing
1 cup sour cream (low fat is fine)
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons garlic salt
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
¼ cup blue cheese, crumbled
In a small bowl or salad shaker, combine all ingredients.
Refrigerate for an hour before serving.
My Burning Kitchen 
That recipe for blue cheese dressing seems too good to be true. My favorite salad lately is spinach with mushrooms and bacon.
I like chinese chicken salad but your salad looks great!
My favorite salad – spring mix greens with candied walnuts, dried cranberries and thinly sliced pears. no dressing, just squeezed lemon.
Nice use of the word Brobdingnagian! I first saw that word in the poem, “Sow” by Sylvia Plath – it was a poem we had to ‘dissect’ for the AP English test in high school. That word irritated me because I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I figured it out by context (the term used was ‘Brobdingnag bulk’).
My favorite salad is a mushroom, sunflower seeds, grilled chicken and ranch on a spinach / lettuce / arugula mix.
Thanks for the giveaway!
I like mushrooms, sunflower seeds, grilled chicken and ranch over a argula, spinach + lettuce mix. delicious!
thanks for the giveaway 🙂
floatingpyramids at gmail.com
I love grilled chicken over iceberg lettuce with cheddar cheese, tomatoes, onions, and bacon! Gotta have ranch dressing too!
i make a really yummy salad with rice noodles, cabbage, cilantro, chicken, carrots, cucumbers, red peppers, pickled onions, and the spicy thai peanut dressing from trader joes.
I’ll eat any salad, as long as it has fruits! Preferably something juicy, like mandarin oranges 🙂
Beet salads are my current favorite – with or without lettuce, sometimes with watermelon, always with goat cheese and some sort of herb vinaigrette. Never with raw onions.
This is the only food I used to know how to make when I was in my early teens: Tuna pasta salad. It’s made with coditos (Mexican macaroni elbows), tuna, veg-all, lettuce and mayo. We ate it with saltine crackers and it’s my favorite thing in summer time, actually I made it last week and it was just as good as I remembered it!
Def will try the recipe for the dressing. I love me a good cesar salad or some grilled romaine with thickened balsamic vinegar. Oh man im hungry.
My favorite salad is my watermelon, arugula nad feta cheese salad. YUM!
I make a wonderful watermelon, feta and arugula salad
My favorite salad is: feta cheese, watermelon and arugula.
My favorite salad right now is asian chicken salad – I love the dressing and the crunch from the veggies, peanuts and wontons!
At the moment, I’d say a really good Chinese Chicken Salad – but I’ve also been partial to a salad I found in a cookbook called, “Desperation Dinners”. It involved chopped rotisserie chicken, field greens, blue cheese, and a homemade raspberry vinaigrette…YUM!