Lunch today was very simple: a classic caesar salad with roasted chicken breast, croutons, sliced avocado and caesar dressing.  I typically don’t buy romaine lettuce as I’m not fond of the big leaves and crunchy center.  I’m a big fan of bitter greens like arugula and watercress.  However, I am not one to let food go to waste and seeing how my boyfriend picked up some fresh romaine lettuce on his last trip to the farmer’s market, I decided to give in to the tried and true.  So here you have it.  A classic caesar salad with chicken.  The chicken was very simple to make.  Just a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper, pop it in the oven for 20 minutes at 375 degrees and you have yourself a moist chicken breast that can be cut up into chunks for the salad.  After I rinsed and dried off the romaine leaves, I tore them up with my hands into bite size pieces and put them in a big bowl.  In the very same bowl, I topped off the romaine lettuce with traditional croutons.

Personally, I prefer lemon and olive oil based dressings.  For obvious reasons, I used good quality store-bought caesar dressing.  I left the dressing on the side so that we can dress the salads ourselves to our own liking.  For me, that was just a drizzle.  What would have made this salad spectacular are anchovies and shaved parmesan (and maybe some halved grape tomatoes thrown in for good measure).  Well, I can either keep wishing or just enjoy what I’ve got…and what I had at the moment was a perfectly ripe avocado and two 7 grain squares of bread.  The wish for anchovies and parmesan was quickly dismissed once we dabbed a little butter on our square of bread and took a bite of this deliciously crisp salad.