Please, no chicken, bacon, cream dressing, or ham.

Going to restaurants, I often need to rearrange the salads. "I would like the BBQ Chicken Salad, please. But, can you remove the chicken, add more tomatoes, and put the dressing on the side?" Ugh, I sound like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. However, salads in restaurants do not contain enough vegetable ingredients, so when the meat is removed you usually only have lettuce and carrots. I knew it was bad last summer when the waitress at Cap City knew me just by my odd order. Last night, in an effort to recover from the gluttony of a vacation in Mexico, I made the following salad. Restaurants should follow suite.

The Right Restaurant Salad.

• 1 cup of edamame
• 2 slices of a purple cabbage chopped (about 1 cup)
• 1 cup of arugula
• 1 cup of carrots shaved
• 1 cup of bean sprouts
• 1 cup of green onions chopped
• 1 red bell pepper sliced
• 1/4 cup sliced almonds
• 1 orange segmented
• 1 cup of rice wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup of lemon juice
• 1 tb sesame oil
• 2 tb soy sauce
• 2 tb of chopped fresh ginger
• 2 tp of honey

1. Mix edamame, cabbage, arugula, carrots, bean sprouts, green onions, red pepper and almonds. Plate the salad mixture, add orange pieces on top.
2. In a small bowl, whisk rice wine vinegar, lemon juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, honey and ginger.
3. Pour vinaigrette over salad.

This serves two, but if you chop up more ingredients, and put them in storage containers, you can have this for lunch the next day like I will . Creating a good salad is actually easy, if you make sure you chop the ingredients ahead of time. Assemble the dry ingredients in a Tupperware, and the wet ingredients, including dressing, in a Ziploc bag-- voila a healthy lunch. As someone who allows herself only 20 minutes to get ready at 6 in the morning for work, I can say there is no excuse for not packing yourself a healthy lunch.