TAG | salad
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Columbia Restaurant’s 1905 Salad
1 Comment | Posted by Gwen in Main Course, Side Dish, Uncategorized
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?

I’m a big advocate for whisking up a super simple salad dressing rather than relying on the fatty, chemically bottled alternatives from the super market. I mean, seriously, it takes all of 3 minutes. Typically I just rock a vinaigrette on some baby greens. Tonight, however, I spotted a mixed container of mache and butter lettuce on the refrigerated shelf at Trader Joes, which made me a very happy lady. If you’ve never tried mache, do it. Do it now. It’s tiny, sweet, tender and slightly nutty. And for a lettuce as mild and gentle as mache, this called for a special dressing.
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