Another big salad

This week's share included two VERY large heads of lettuce. Aside from the usual dinner salad, which we have almost every night, I like to do a lot of entree-sized salads as our entire meal when the weather is warm. Tonight, I went with a taco-style salad. This is another not-really-a-recipe dish, and it's also no-cook, which makes it a real winner on a hot day. A bed of lettuce is topped with a scattering of crunchy tortilla chips and a mixture of black beans, corn, tomato, avocado, scallions and cilantro. A lot of people seem to like creamy dressings on their taco salad, but I prefer a vinaigrette. The one I like is flavored with lime juice, chipotle (or rather, the adobo sauce from canned chipotle chiles), and honey. Rather than pouring the dressing over the entire salad, I mix it into the beans, corn, tomato etc. and spoon that over the lettuce and chips. That way, if you have some of the bean mixture leftover, you can easily store it in the fridge for a day or two with no worries about limp soggy lettuce (yuck). A link to the vinaigrette recipe follows the photo below.

Here's how it turned out. A food photographer I am not; please believe me when I say it was filling and delicious!


Black Bean Taco Salad with Chipotle-Honey-Lime Vinaigrette