A lighter fare...

You might think that everything we eat fits into our Fat Friday category (I don't blame you if you do, since I tend to only blog about those meals), but we justify those meals by eating healthier during the week (and dragging our butts to the gym 5 days a week too...). A lot of our meals include a side salad (in place of other vegetables), which we then beef up with trail mix to make it a bit heartier, but once a week, we try to include at least one meal that is just a salad. But your probably know that salad can be kind of  blah just by itself, so we have discovered a couple really great twists to traditional greens with dressings. I thought I would share one with you here.

This recipe came from a magazine I picked up last summer, Cooking For 2 by Taste Of Home. We get most of our recipes and ideas from this magazine, and I have since been searching the racks at book stores and convenience stores to find another edition - no such luck! If you ever come across a new edition, please do let me know where to find it, because it really is the perfect cooking recipe if you're just cooking for 2 people (its like they knew what they were doing when they created it...). Taste Of Home puts out a lot of different magazines (which I also like, and include some great recipes, but they just are not the same...), so I wonder if this is either a yearly edition, or they simply stopped making it. In any case, the hunt still continues...

The salad we enjoyed the other night was a Lime Chicken on Fruited Greens, the one on the cover, in fact (their photo is probably more appetizing than mine...I'm still working on presentation skills. So far, Matt doesn't deduct any points for my lack thereof...). We pick up a bag of already cut greens, and top it with chicken, blackberries, peach slices, goat cheese, and pine nuts. For the chicken, we marinade it in a lime and olive oil dressing with thyme, the same one we drizzle on the salad. Combined, its a really great flavour combination, and each bite is full of some wonderful tastes! Sometimes you need to make some substitutions to the ingredients, such as which fruits to include depending on the season. We couldn't locate any nectarines, so we picked up a can of sliced peaches (they're from the same family, right?). And since raspberries were a little expensive, we opted not to include them.

If you're ever looking to add of bit of flare to your salads in an effort to eat a bit healthier some nights,  I would really recommend this one (it's a favourite of ours, at least). It does not  take a lot of work, and you can really personalize to your own tastes and preferences by switching up the fruits and the cheese, and I think the lime dressing and marinade are a really nice substitute to some heavier dressings. And if you forget to take out the chicken from the freezer prior to cooking, I've found that boiling them (yes, I know, sounds weird, but it actually cooks them really quickly, and they stay moist and tender...) prior to adding the marinade, it helps speed up the process. Then I put the chicken on our indoor grill for a few minutes to complete the cooking, slice and serve, and voila - instant chicken and dinner.