This is one of those posts that’s almost more about what we don’t like. We don’t like lettuce is number one. He doesn’t like cucumbers, and almost as much tomatoes and mushrooms. I don’t like sour, vinegary salad dressings, nor sugary sweet ones. So, you can see how salads can be a problem, but we are happy to eat a bowl of raw vegetables, minus the list above for him. Tonight is a frozen pizza night, frozen because I am less likely to eat much of it, since the frozen ones are not that great. By itself, the frozen pizza is not much of a meal, so some kind of salad helps it along. This salad is almost a meal in itself and easy for you to customize for your own purposes. I made a simple buttermilk dressing with no added sugar and a lot of garlic to dress it, with enough left over for dipping some chicken strips tomorrow.

I quick-sautéed the chick peas and zucchini in olive oil, but it could all be raw, except the bacon. It just depends on whether you want crunch. You might notice there are no juicy items in the title, and that’s where the options come in. For me, I found a couple of heirloom tomatoes, and for my husband, there are black plums—fruit makes a nice substitute for tomatoes in a salad. The last time I bought black plums, last summer, they were recalled after I had already fed them to  everybody. No one got sick, but it made me reluctant to buy them again, until today. It’s too bad that food can be risky, but nothing grows in our garden in the winter under 20″ of snow, so you have to risk what’s in the produce department. The plums seem okay for this time of year, a little juicy, if not as ripe as in the summer.

The fruits

Ready to assemble