(I’m currently walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela – follow along on Instagram!)

The focus for this year’s Food Revolution Day was about sharing the power of cooking, the benefits of cooking from scratch and, ultimately showing people that changing our food choices can make us both healthier and happier. Instead of one official recipe as there has been in years past, this year, we have a set of 10 recipes chosen by Jamie Oliver that he deems the “Starter Pack of Cooking”. Each recipe covers a different skill and technique that can give anyone the confidence to cook good, real, healthy meals for themselves and their families, for now and the future. Jamie has spoken about the idea of ten recipes to save your life since his TED talk in 2010. Each month from now until December, I’ll be sharing my own twist on Jamie’s recipes which will be showcased along with nine other Ambassador’s ideas over on JamieOliver.Com. You can see previous posts here.

For this month’s Food Revolution Recipe Twist, we were tasked with tweaking Jamie’s simple green salad with lemon dressing. This was such a hit when I made it with my Cooking Basics cooking club – the boys loved making the dressing and shaking it up…

And I was shocked to see how keen they were on composing their own salad plates when they were given the choice of greens… (if they make it they will (be much more likely to) eat it!)

Such a fabulous basic recipe that everyone should know how to make!

When I was considering how I would tweak this, I went back to my OWN basics. When I am preparing a meal for one, a salad is very often the direction I will go and I’m thankful that I know how to make a pretty good tasting vinaigrette (if I do say so myself!).

One of my favourites, because it’s so versatile, is lemon-based with a smattering of poppyseeds and today, the recipe I am sharing sees it dressing a big chopped salad – lots of lettuce and tomatoes with bacon, avocado and a poached egg. It’s pretty much my idea of the perfect salad-for-dinner.

Big chopped bacon lettuce avocado and tomato salad with lemon-poppyseed vinaigrette

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Prep time

10 mins

Total time

10 mins

Salad for dinner? Yes, when it involves bacon, lettuce, tomato, avocado and a poached egg dressed in a lemon poppyseed vinaigrette!

Author: Mardi Michels

Recipe type: Salad

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• For the salad:
• 2-3 handfuls mixed salad leaves (I used mostly romaine to keep some crunch!), shredded finely
• 10-12 cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
• 3 rashers bacon, cooked and roughly chopped or crumbled
• ½ small avocado, cubed
• 1 poached or soft-boiled egg
• For the dressing ( makes 175mls/ ¾ cup so it's much more than you need for 1 serve)
• 80mls (1/3 cup) olive oil
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard (not the grainy kind)
• ½ teaspoon poppyseeds
• salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

1. For the dressing:
2. Place all ingredients in a clean jam jar and shake well.
3. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
4. Refrigerate until needed.
5. Place the salad leaves and tomatoes in a large bowl. Mix to combine.
6. Shake the salad dressing well.
7. Dress the salad according to taste then use a pair of tongs or salad utensils to toss the salad, thoroughly coating the leaves with the dressing.
8. Add in the bacon and avocado and gently toss the leaves to combine.
9. Serve topped with the poached or soft boiled egg.

Notes

Note: the dressing recipe yields approximately 175mls (3/4 cup) of dressing which is more than you will need for 1 serve of salad.

3.5.3208

What about you – what’s YOUR favourite salad (dressing)?

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