Whenever I think of healthy lunch options, salads are certainly an obvious choice. However, salads done poorly can end up being a step in the wrong direction. If you bring a boring/flavorless/blah salad, it’s going to be all the more tempting to buy something from the food court, go out with coworkers, etc. Thankfully, salads don’t need to be boring. To me, it just takes a few components to elevate a salad from blah to omgiwanttoeatthiseveryday. This salad originated from desperate scrounging in a bare weekend fridge for something, anything, that could constitute lunch.
I combined baby spinach leaves with oven roasted tomatoes, a bit of boursin cheese, crumbled pita chips, and a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette. And then I fell in love. This has all the components of a really good salad. Start with greens you actually like as the base. If you don’t like the base, you’re not going to like the salad. Roasted tomatoes add another dimension of flavor and boursin provides creaminess (and all around awesome-ness). Normally I would add croutons for some crunch but I believe my little crouton monster had eaten them all so I opted for crumbled pita chips instead. They worked so well that now I use them whenever we happen to be out of croutons. This crave-worthy salad has become a definite favorite of mine. I hope you like it too!