Italian Chopped Salad

The weather is starting to warm up and sometimes it’s nice to have a salad for a meal. I love a chopped salad as much as the next one, and I especially love an Italian chopped salad with delicious Italian ingredients.  Delicious ingredients , and I made my dressing the day before , cut salami and cheese the day before. Just had to assemble salad the day we were eating it. When you do all the prep before it’s pretty easy . Also if you just like to use one kind of lettuce use whatever you like. I like a combo of iceberg and romaine lettuces in here and sometimes I just use romaine . It’s key to chop/shred lettuce into bite size pieces. This is obviously a loose recipe so change out whatever you’d like to suit yourself. You can absolutely leave out the meat if you’d like and go vegetarian here.

Ingredients:

1 head romaine lettuce cut into bite size pieces or whatever lettuces you like

1/2 head iceberg lettuce , shredded or chopped up

1 cup rinsed canned red kidney beans, patted dry

1 cup rinsed canned garbanzo beans, patted dry

8 ounces of hard salami, cubed–use a really good salami. If you have an Italian deli near you that’s the best .

6 ounces of provolone cheese, cubed–also use as good a provolone as you can find.

baby plum tomatoes or cherry tomatoes cut into small pieces

*of course some chopped up green or black olives would be really nice

Red Wine Vinaigrette:

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon honey

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 cup olive oil

Freshly Ground Pepper to taste

Mix the vinegar, lemon juice, honey and salt in a blender. With the machine running , stream the olive oil in gradually. Taste for salt and pepper to taste.

Assemble all ingredients in a large bowl for a nice presentation and dress salad as you’d like or do it individually.