I absolutely love a cobb salad. It really is a meal in a bowl and a healthy one at that.
This is a great way to use up leftover chicken. The recipe calls for grilled chicken, but if you have leftover roasted or baked chicken, breast meat or dark, feel free to use it. As long as it hasn’t been cooked in a sauce it will work just fine.
Did You Know?…
The cobb salad recipe is said to have originated at The Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. Bob Cobb, the owner, is said to have put together the salad around 1937 to satisfy his own late night craving. He thought the salad was so good, he began serving it to his restaurant clients the very next day, calling it, appropriately enough, his “cobb salad”.
How to Make Cobb Salad Restaurant Style:
For some reason I am not sure about, this salad is often served with the individual ingredients in separate little piles on top of the lettuce. Some restaurants will arrange the ingredients in rows, while others will serve them in small distinctive piles around the plate. That makes for a great presentation but certainly feel free to mix it up to eat it.
Cobb Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing
Ingredients
- 8 ounces chicken breast, grilled (about 2 chicken breasts)
- 6 slices bacon, fried crisp
- 3 hard cooked eggs, halved
- 1 tomato, sliced or 8 cherry tomatoes, cut in half
- 4 ounces blue cheese, or gorgonzola cheese, crumbled
- 1 avocado, small, peeled and sliced
- 4 cups romaine lettuce
Instructions
- To make the blue cheese dressing, reserve 1/3 cup of the blue cheese. Beat the remaining blue cheese and cream cheese together in a small bowl with an electric mixer on low speed, until it is creamy. Add the mayonnaise and the cream. Beat on medium speed, again until the mixture is creamy. Stir in the reserved blue cheese. Makes 1 2/3 cups. Refrigerate while you are making the salad.
- Fry the bacon until it is crispy and boil the eggs until they are hard set. Let the eggs cool.
- Wash the romaine lettuce and cut it into bite size pieces. Arrange it on two large salad plates.
- Slice the chicken breast across the grain and lay the slices on the lettuce, along one corner of each plate. Crumble the bacon into small pieces and place them in a small pile on the lettuce. Peel and halve the hard cooked eggs and add them to the salad as well as the sliced tomatoes and sliced avocado. Add a small pile of the crumbled blue cheese in the middle of the salad or spread it over all of the ingredients.
- Drizzle the whole salad with the blue cheese dressing and serve.
Notes
For the Blue Cheese Dressing:
- 3/4 cup blue cheese, crumbled
- 3 ounces cream cheese, softened
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing (Miracle Whip type)
- 1/3 cup half-and-half cream
Nutrition
Serves 4 as a side salad or 2 as a main course salad.
Variations:
- Add 1/2 cup chopped watercress to the salad. Watercress adds a nice peppery flavor and lots of nutrition.
- French dressing or a simple vinaigrette also work really well with this recipe. Whatever salad dressing you choose, just make sure the taste of the dressing doesn’t clash with the blue cheese.
- If you are not a blue cheese lover (I am not), substitute grated cheddar or Swiss cheese. It’s delicious too.
- To Make Low Fat Blue Cheese Salad Dressing:
Decrease the blue cheese to 1/2 cup. Use 4 ounces of reduced fat cream cheese. Substitute 1/4 cup skim milk for the half-and-half. Use reduced fat mayonnaise. - The dressing tastes best if it is covered and refrigerated for at least 3 hours to blend the flavours, but of course you can use it right away. Cover and refrigerate any leftover dressing.
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