Cara's Greek Salad

Lately I have been craving Greek salads, but to purchase one large enough to take care of my cravings for a few days is over $20.  This past week it was my turn to bring one to our weekly get together, and because I had discovered a new Greek dressing at our local grocery, I decided to see if making a Greek salad would be cheaper and better.  While I'm not sure if it was any cheaper it did turn out quite nicely.

The first thing I discovered, beside a good dressing, is you need to have a really good potato salad.  While potato salad is not an official ingredient in the traditional Greek salad, but one added by Americans, it does add flavor and turns an ordinary salad into something extraordinary.  I found that my local grocery has experimented with a baked potato salad that includes bits of real bacon and is simply delicious.  The first salad I made I put the baked potato salad in the middle of the lettuce.  I found this to be too hard to find when dishing out the salad so the second go around I put scoops of the salad on top of the lettuce all around the bowl.  It was easy to make sure each person got some potato salad that way and it looked pretty.

The second thing I discovered was that in making my own salad I could put in ingredients that I liked and omit those that I don't like such as Greek olives and onions.  I'm an olive eater.  I love green and black olives.  In fact there are several stories regarding my passion for black olives, and my family use to wrap up a can of them for a birthday present for me each year, but Greek olives?  Can't stand them.  They are too vinegar tasting or something.  I try to eat them, but end up spitting them out into a napkin every time.  So out went the Greek olives and in went the black.  And while I like the taste that onions bring to a Greek salad, my poor body can't tolerate them unless they are cooked so out went the onions.

I added feta cheese, peperoncinis, tomatoes (for the hubby and others), cucumbers, and seasoning.  The results were delicious and mouth watering, and while the ingredients added up in cost I did get two salads out of it.  I just wish now I could make warm pita bread with tzatziki.  Oh, my gosh, how I love that tzatziki stuff!