Blue Cheese

Gina: You gotta love an enormous chopped salad made with just about everything in the vegetable drawer. Our version includes the traditional ingredients of bacon, egg, and blue cheese, along with an array of colorful vegetables for fresh flavor and crunch, and our creamy Barbecue Ranch Dressing (imagine the tart, spicy creaminess of ranch with the sweetness and smoke of the barbecue sauce; it’s a match made in heaven). Your vegetables will be “grooving” in the bowl! This is a hearty salad worthy of being a meal all on its own.

Gina: Ours is a spinach salad with some serious attitude. In addition to the bacon and creamy blue cheese dressing, we add sweetened pecans and tart dried cranberries, and the overall effect is to give this salad a festive feel. It’s a great dinner party starter, and it’s especially good partnered with a fat grilled steak. The spiced pecans are good enough to eat on their own as a snack, but try to save them for the salad! And even though we call for dried cranberries, you can substitute a variety of dried fruit, including dried cherries or golden raisins.

Pat: When the grill is fired up for dinner—as it often is in our house—these toasts make great appetizers. The grilled vegetables and vinegar create an appealing relish that’s the perfect foil for Gorgonzola cheese. The pungent, savory flavors are a fantastic kickoff to a juicy grilled steak and a killer bottle of red wine.

Gorgonzola continues to age as it is stored in the refrigerator, intensifying in piquancy as it does. To slow this process down, wrap the cheese tightly in plastic wrap and store it in the coldest part of the refrigerator. This sauce is a good way to use leftover Gorgonzola cheese.

Believe it or not, it wasn’t so long ago that most people thought blue cheese was a bit exotic—a stinky, strange cheese with (heaven forbid!) mold in its veins. But blue has gained traction because its rich, creamy texture and tangy taste are fabulous—whether eaten out of hand, crumbled over a salad, or stirred into a dressing. But this is no lean cheese, my friends. Thankfully, a little goes a long way, and there are great-tasting low-fat blue cheeses available in most major supermarkets today.

Cobb Salad gets its name from Robert Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles and first cousin of baseball great Ty Cobb. The story goes that he was browsing through the refrigerator late one night, looking for a snack, and could only find bits and pieces of leftovers—which he chopped up and turned into a salad. The rest is history. Here’s a version of Cobb Salad that was put together with a little more thought—and a lot fewer calories.

Who doesn’t love a big thick chunk of iceberg lettuce with bacon and blue cheese dressing alongside a juicy cowboy-cut ribeye? It’s one of my favorite steakhouse meals. Problem is, at 700-plus calories and more than 80 grams of fat—for the salad alone!—it’s a very bad bargain. Thankfully, the availability of reduced-fat blue cheese means you don’t have to choose between the steak and the salad.

This is such a great salad—especially in the fall, when beets are in season. The sweet, earthy flavor of the beets provides a nice foil for the tangy blue cheese and peppery arugula. By lightly crushing the walnuts, you need less of this healthy but high-fat nut in your salad. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference.

A Cobb salad is usually a big mound of lettuce topped with strips of chopped chicken, bacon, avocado, tomatoes, hard-boiled egg, and blue cheese. I love it, but I’ve noticed that once I mix it up and start eating, my fork is busy fishing around the lettuce trying to catch all the chicken and bacon. So, I decided to hold the lettuce. I did, however, add some watercress, but that’s for its great peppery flavor!

I really love grilled chicken salad as a go-to, no-brainer supper solution, but the Chicken Caesar is so over for me—I need a few years off! So here’s another fresh chicken salad idea; eat your heart out, Caesar!

You have to buy a quart of buttermilk in order to get the 2 cups you need for this recipe, but I’ve got your back on the extra 2 cups: transfer it to a large resealable food storage bag and freeze it. Don’t forget to label the bag—if you’re like me, you have enough mystery items in your freezer already! Use the buttermilk to make this recipe again, or check out the recipe for Bacon and Creamy Ranch Chicken Burgers with Crispy Scallion “Sticks” on page 236.

Here’s another one of my Better Burgers. This one comes out looking so impressive. I would serve it even when I entertain (were I not so exhausted!).

This is like a steak dinner with onion rings, steak fries, and salad with blue cheese dressing, all chopped up in a bowl together. If you skipped lunch, this is your payoff.

Serve with barbecue chips and oil-and-vinegar dressed slaw. So much better for you than wings, you could eat two!