Spinach salad

I thought I did pretty well at the grocery store this week - no time to get to Sunset Farm. There was a little impulse spending, though, like the avocado, the olives, and a whole bunch of fruit that is neither in season nor from this country. Anyway, I wasn't going to get salad-makings, because salads just take a whole lot of time and effort to make and there is rarely enough leftover for lunch the next day, but the Big Y had a giant tub of baby spinach on sale for $3.00 - ok, done. Probably means it will go bad in a day, but then I'll just cook it. I made it out of there for $24.83, just under that meaningless $25 limit I've set for myself, but I was impressed, given that I went in there with no list, and a lot of the stuff will get eaten next week, thanks to some poor planning. The big spending came on the cantaloupe, mushrooms, spinach, cilantro, avocado, and olives. But the salad I made with some of this stuff was delicious!


The dressing was sweet: olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and a little fig jam and some salt. Quite tasty. The filler was baby spinach, and the toppings included toasted walnuts, mozzarella, kalamata olives, avocado, tomato, and orange pepper. I guess I could put less stuff on my salads, and then they'd be quicker to make, but I just don't roll like that.

I don't have a photo, but I cooked up a chicken thigh to go with it - I recently had a lightbulb moment where I realized that if I rendered some of the fat out of chicken skin, and then stuck it in the oven, it would crisp up even better, and I was right. I highly recommend that approach! The rent-a-dogs loved cleaning up all that chicken fat out of the pan, too.