Chopped Green Salad - Not your (or my) Grandma's recipe!

Okay so this is a bit of a cheat but I don't always cook from my Grandma's cookbook (that would be a lot of canned soup!) so I thought I would share a few other favourite recipes like this one from Jamie Oliver.

It hardly seems fair calling it a recipe - it is a basic outline of a chopped salad from Jamie's Food Revolution which Jamie then encourages us to play with however we wish.

Here are the ingredients. There is supposed to be fresh basil in the salad but my store was out. I thought I would throw in some pesto for the basil flavour. I also wasn't quite sure what "English mustard" was and didn't see anything on the shelf that looked right so I decided to either use Dijon or a sweet hot mustard I had (you can see both bottles at the back).

I only made a quarter of the recipe as it was for four and I was only eating as one! As you will see I will need a much bigger cutting board if I am to make this as a full recipe.

I started by chopping the scallion and cucumber. 




Then I added half of an avocado, some lettuce and sprouts (this is also when the basil would be added). This gets chopped together.




I added the optional cheddar cheese and chopped that in. My santoku knife would have been a good choice for this recipe because the avocado and cheese really wanted to stick to the knife.


At this point a well is made in the salad and olive oil, red wine vinegar, mustard (I used only the Dijon) and salt and pepper are added and mixed in with the salad.




I served it up with some apple slices as it called out for some contrasting colour!




You might notice I never added the pesto - I forgot about it and I'm kind of glad that I did. I don't think the salad was missing too much for not having the basil and I don't think pesto would have had the same effect.

What did I think? I really liked it. I'm actually not much for green salads because I find lettuce so boring and the "add-ons" that make salad tasty for me (dried fruit, cheese, nuts, dressing) always seem to defeat the purpose of a healthy salad. I really liked having the salad chopped up like this. It mixed all the flavours up and then there would be hits of old cheddar or creamy avocado. I have to say I was very happy. I'm looking forward to having this for lunch or a dinner accompaniment for the next few days!