12W12S11: Salad of the Week - Cobb Salad

I'm actually EXCITED about this salad, because I love me a good Cobb salad. Not that this one is going to be quite as good as the best, mind you, but it will be a pretty good approximation (assuming that you do not like avocados, which I don't, so you won't find them in this recipe).

• 2½ ounces Romaine lettuce (about 2 cups)
• 2½ cooked diced chicken
• 1 tablespoon bacon bits
• 1 hard-boiled egg, chopped
• 2 tablespoons crumbled reduced-fat blue cheese
• ½ cup grape or cherry tomatoes
• Choice of dressing (I used balsamic vinaigrette)

Like I said, this is an approximation, and to make it easily lunchbox-friendly, I used easy-to-find ingredients. Reduced-fat blue cheese crumbles might be the hardest thing to find on the list. If you want, you can probably use regular blue cheese, but of course I am trying to be careful of calories, even if I am only eating a salad for lunch. Note that  the "real" recipe calls for assorted lettuces including curly endive and watercress -- I went with Romaine here because it's easy, but you can just as easily substitute any number of pre-packaged fancy green blends. (I don't like weeds in my salad, so I try to keep it pretty simple.) It also calls for ½ an avocado, peeled, seeded, and cut into ½" chunks -- you can add that if you want to. (Blech.) Also, a real Cobb salad has fresh chopped chives -- I suppose you can use a small amount of dried chives if you want to, but I don't -- and you're supposed to chop the egg white and the egg yolk separately, and also seed and chop a whole tomato, but who wants to do that much work? You can always halve or quarter the cherry tomatoes if you're feeling fancy. And in a pinch, to make things even easier, you can substitute a reduced-fat blue cheese dressing for the blue cheese crumbles and the vinaigrette. (The recipe I linked to also uses Roquefort instead of blue cheese, and it puts the Roquefort in the dressing, which is homemade, and ... well, you can see how my version will work well enough to satisfy your Cobb salad cravings with like 75% less work.)

Blahblahblah calorie disclaimer: Lose It calculated this at about 255-275 calories per serving before dressing, which would depend of course on the calorie counts in your chicken, bacon, and blue cheese crumbles. My ingredients came in at 265 calories, which included 95 calories for the chicken, 25 calories for the bacon bits, and 40 calories for the blue cheese. And I went with Wish-Bone balsamic vinaigrette for the dressing, with 60 calories per 2 tablespoons, which comes out to 325 calories total. (It makes a great marinade for chicken and steak, too, BTW.)