My vegetarian salad can kick your turkey sandwich's butt!

I made the bestest salad yesterday. And I calculated the protein. Don't ask why. I just did. It had over 9 grams. According to the Hillshire Farms sliced turkey package...there's like 5 or 6 grams in the amount I would normally eat on a sandwich. So there!



I have been staying away from refined sugar lately.
No soda, (diet or not).
No white anything. Bread...pasta...rice...jeans
I use 'Sugar in the Raw' to sweeten my herbal tea.
And I found a lovely fruit preserve naturally sweetened with grape juice. It is wicked good on whole grain pancakes and in oatmeal.


Seriously, for several weeks I had no processed sugar. And guess what? Normal food started tasting like cotton candy! Really. Ask my neighbor, I keep pestering her with stories of my bizarre lunches. One day I was having leftover whole grain pasta with some beans and sweet potato thrown in and I covered it with stewed tomatoes, warmed it up and I thought someone was pulling an April fool's joke on me it tasted so good? I couldn't get over it. Like candy? The best part of course, was losing over 5 pounds! I haven't been able to loose any weight for 3 years...not with exercise, not by eating lots of protein, my butt never changed one single ounce. I also changed a few other things in my diet, (Okay. So I nearly went Vegan for a month--I'll save that story for another post), but still this was pretty shocking to me.


Here's my saladtastic (I know--enough of that, right?) recipe:

Big stinkin' huge handful of mixed greens (none of that iceberg stuff for me).
1/2 of a cooked and chunked up Sweet Potato, I nuke mine for 4 minutes on high.
1/4 cup cooked bulgar wheat (You are whining about this aren't you? Turns out bulgar is fabulous, has a ton of protein and sort of takes on the flavor of everything around it--so just try it! I can tell no one is eating this because spellcheck thinks I'm trying to type vulgar!)
1/2 of a gorgeous (as Deana would say) green pear, sliced nice and thin.
1/4 Cup white beans (straight from the can, no warming these up you baby).
Handful of pistachio nuts, maybe 1 1/2 Tablespoons, but who measures nuts? (don't answer that).
Handful of sliced almonds, again just throw some in.
The same handful of dried cranberries.

I like a sweet dressing on my mega salad, just a smidgen-- poppy seed or strawberry vinaigrette. I hate the idea of ranch on it, but if you must you must, if it will get you to try bulgar, then fine- pour on the fat ranch! Not that this salad doesn't have fat in it, it does, the GOOD kind.

And please, substitute lots of different ingredients at will. How about whole wheat pasta instead of the bulgar? Or try black beans? Or any number of fruit and nut combinations. My mouth is watering at the thought of adding a nice avacado, not too soft, just the right firmness, and ripeness.....and


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