Lumpy Girl Claire's Diet
- Salad Days

I don't think I can qualify as being young and inexperienced, but I have been living through my Salad Days - mixed greens with grilled chicken and dried cherries, baby spinach with red onion and mushrooms, romaine with feta and Calamata olives. Sandwiches for lunch have become thing of the past.

Bread? What's that?

Lunchmeat? No way!

Chips? Too tempting.

Brownie? Oh, Yeah! Er…I mean…not this girl!

Give me greens and lots of them. Give me variety, too. Iceberg just doesn't cut it for me these days unless it's smothered in blue cheese dressing which kind of defeats the purpose of eating the salad in the first place.

I can't say I know what all the different lettuces are when I buy the salad mix. I take the word of the salad purveyor that those funny looking leaves are edible. I confess I don't eat the ones that look like they were picked off the shrubbery along my back fence.

My sister is less adventurous than I. On viewing her first gourmet salad, she scowled and whined, "I thought they said garden, not lawn!"

I can't just have the salad greens, though. I need something on top to fill me up and keep me from keeling over from starvation. My usually topper is chicken, sometimes cheese (gorgonzola is my fave), any kind of additional veggie, sometimes strawberries, pears or dried fruit.

Walnuts, pine nuts, and slivered almonds-any kind of nut is good in a salad too. Of course, if you add too many of these, you are right back in the blue cheese dressing kind of predicament.

Last but not least, there is the dressing. My diet allows me two teaspoons of oil per day, so I use that up on my salad, usually in a vinaigrette dressing. If I have to have the creamier dressings (and sometimes I HAVE to - I'm human), I use the fork dip method that I learned from watching Richard Simmons.

I get my dressing on the side, dip my fork into it and then spear some lettuce. That way I get a taste of the dressing with each bite, but use only a fraction of what I normally would have. It may look a little silly, but it works.

All salad and no dessert makes Claire a cranky girl, so I'm sharing a recipe I got at my WW meeting - this time no Twinkies involved so eat with abandon.

• 32 oz fat free plain yogurt
• 2 small pkgs sugar free instant pudding mix - cheesecake is good.
• 1 20 oz can of crushed pineapple in its own juice - drained
• 1 medium can of mandarin oranges in own juice - drained (substitute any fruit you want)
• 1 8oz container of fat free cool whip
• Mix together and enjoy.

Claire