If you’ve never heard of Columbia Restaurant, it means you haven’t spent much time in Florida.  It’s a chain of about a dozen restaurants that to my knowledge is restricted to the Sunshine State.  To be perfectly honest, it’s not a very spectacular restaurant overall.  It definitely caters to the tourists and the snow birds, and as a college student, I found it severely overpriced.

So why is it worth mentioning?  Because they have a spectacular salad on their menu, called the 1905 salad, named for the year their flagship restaurant opened in Ybor City, a district in Tampa.  The 1905 salad is Columbia’s big ta-dah, because all the servers know the recipe by heart and whip it up table-side.  This should clue you in to how simple and fast you can prepare this for a weeknight dinner.  The classic is with ham, which you can swap out for turkey or shrimp.  I like the combo of ham and turkey, but rock it out to your tastes.  Oh and did I mention it was really delicious?

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Just a quick post tonight. I thought I’d share my recipe from dinner even though I didn’t take many pics.

You see, I’ve had a batch of homemade chicken stock sitting in the freezer, just waiting to be used.  And since I spent so much time on it, I wanted to showcase it in a recipe that would be all about the broth.  Hence the obvious choice, soup.  All it took was Kim talking about soup today and I knew it was time.

This is my take on Italian wedding soup, partly inspired by a Tuscan soup called ribollita, sortof a minestrone thickened with bread with tons of local, cheap vegetables.  And since we’re still getting our CSA veggie delivery we had a plethora of local, cheap veggies on hand.  It basically came down to luscious chicken stock base with delicious, basily chicken meatballs, cannellini beans and lots of healthy, vibrant kale.

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After that delicious ultimate steakums dinner this week, I guilted myself into craving something a little lighter. I stumbled upon my love for spaghetti squash back in my South Beach days and this is one of the few dishes that still remains in my repertoire. It’s filling, tasty, and very healthful.

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