Chopped Salad with Pears, Pecans, & Cranberries

For my entire life I've disliked lettuce. Iceberg, romaine, that purple stuff... it all just tastes like leaves. Yuck. It's actually pretty embarrassing when I'm at weddings and fancy dinners and they serve salad and I have to make the waiter take away my still-full salad plate. I push it all into a dense clump on one side of the plate to make it look like I ate half of it. Or I make Jeff eat half of mine. 

Anyway, fast forward to about a year ago - I started eating spinach salads (spruced up with strawberries and walnuts and yummy raspberry vinaigrette dressing), and I actually kind of liked them. So I decided that I like spinach, but not lettuce. It was a grand development because I could at least order a spinach salad at a restaurant and eat some of it (this was a huge blessing for all those law firm interview dinners I went to last summer!). 

Fast forward a little more to a few weeks ago, and all of the sudden - I realized that apparently I now like romaine lettuce too. Iceberg and arugula and that purple stuff - all of those I still hate. But somehow I figured out how to eat romaine lettuce and enjoy it. I ate like three Caesar salads in one week when I first discovered it.

Anyway, with my new found love for romaine lettuce tucked in my back pocket, I found this recipe on Pinterest and had to give it a shot. It's totally delicious!

Yum!

Recipe adapted from here.

Ingredients:

1 head of romaine lettuce, chopped (about 6-8 cups chopped lettuce)

2 Bosc pears, chopped

1 cup dried cranberries

1 1/2 cups chopped pecans

8 slices turkey bacon, cooked until crispy and crumbled

6 oz feta cheese, crumbled

Poppyseed dressing

Balsamic Vinaigrette

Directions:

1. Combine the lettuce, pears, cranberries, pecans, bacon, and feta cheese. 

2. Drizzle with the poppyseed dressing and balsamic vinaigrette (I used about 60% poppyseed and 40% balsamic). {If I were you, I'd drizzle the dressing after putting the salad onto plates so you can have leftovers without wilty lettuce!}

3. Eat!

(chopped romaine)

(with the feta, pecans, pears, bacon, and cranberries)

(yum!)

Ta-da!

Enjoy!