Discovering the joy of salad lunches

The weather turned warm around here, warm enough for the beach to start to fill up and for us to realize, Woah! This bathing suit looks…filled up!

We immediately turned to Phase One of the South Beach Diet, which is a very good and simple eating plan. Oh yes, we miss our wine and our pasta and our fruit. But for a mere two weeks, we’ll be fine.

Meanwhile, no door closes without another opening. Are we right? Because we are being so good, we’re currently eating leafy green salads every single day for lunch. This is something we should do all the time, not just for a diet. Because we work at home, it is very easy for us to eat heaping plates of leftovers, or mini tacos from Trader Joe’s or grilled cheese or…

You get the picture. It’s not always satisfying, not always healthy, rarely low-cal.

This salad thing is tricky at first. Who wants a salad bad enough each day to make the salad? Even with prewashed greens and plenty of good ingredients, it just doesn’t seem fast and easy. Besides, we’ve long felt that other people’s salads are always much better than our own.

Once we got past our natural rejection of a homemade luncheon salad, however, we are now converted.

Take some greens. Throw in some onion, a dash of slivered orange pepper. A few mini tomatoes. We need protein, so perhaps we’ll use some turkey or chicken breast, some diced string cheese, some hard boiled egg, some seeds or garbanzo beans. We are watching the oil, but we don’t love dressing anyway. Instead, we’ve substituted some avocado.

It’s by-the-book South Beach friendly, fast, healthy, easy, filling.

We think we may never go back to our sandwich, pre-made, junk-filled grab-whatever lunches again.