Sunday Meal Planning Series {A Healthier Cobb Salad}

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Our family eats a lot of salads during the summer. I’m fortunate that my three-year-old loves salad. Other vegetables are a challenge, but for some reason he likes salad.

Cobb salads have always been my favorite at a restaurant, but with the cheese, bacon, salad dressing they can be as calorie-laden as a hamburger and fries! So when I came across Bethenny Frankel’s recipe for Healthier Cobb Salad, it became my go-to.

Bethenny uses rotisserie chicken, but I used grilled boneless skinless chicken breasts – this is a great recipe for using up leftovers. One more side note – traditionally, Cobb salad has crumbled blue cheese but my husband has an aversion to blue cheese dating back to a failed lasagna recipe experiment from his college days, so we used feta. Here’s how I made it.

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Ingredients:

3 hearts of romaine, chopped

6 oz turkey bacon, cooked in microwave until crisp and crumbled

2 cooked chicken breasts, shredded or chopped

1 pints cherry tomatoes, halved

10 oz feta cheese, crumbled

3 avocados, halved, pitted & scored into cubes

3 hard-boiled eggs, coarsely chopped

2 oz black olives, coarsely chopped

⅓ cup low-fat ranch dressing mixed with ⅓ cup light vinaigrette

Directions:

  1. Arrange romaine on plates or a serving platter.
  2. Arrange salad ingredients in stripes over the lettuce, then drizzle the dressing in stripes over the top.

IMG_2685Bethenny is big on “use-what-you-have” variations. You can mix this up in so many ways to fit your preference or what you have on hand. Substitute shrimp, turkey, or tofu for the chicken, use any kind of crispy leafy greens in place of the romaine, use regular bacon instead of turkey, use diced heirloom tomatoes instead of cherry, use any strongly flavored crumbled or shredded cheese, etc. You can also arrange all of the ingredients buffet-style at the counter and let your family add their choice of toppings.

Be sure and check out the other recipes in our Sunday Meal Planning series!