Kickin’ It Cold-School

It is so hot and humid here it feels like a sauna outside. 112 F is too hot for man and beast! It was so hot that we didn’t eat breakfast. At lunchtime, I looked outside to see sweat drenched people rushing from car to building and decided I didn’t need to eat then either. Suppertime came and I thought of the coolest food I could and so we had an old-school, cold meal.

I remembered dad allowing us to have salad and pudding on the hottest evenings of summer when I was a kid. To dad, salad was what you had before a meal, not a meal itself. He also thought that a sandwich was a snack. In the 60’s a salad that involved more than iceberg lettuce and French dressing was truly extravagant. When Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix and something called a chef salad made its debut, we didn’t know what to make of it. But we soon grew to love it and I still have great memories of the excitement I felt on the nights I knew we would be having salad and pudding. Tonight was the perfect night to relive that feeling.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need for the salad – I’ve modernized the recipe a bit though, no leftover bone-in ham or lettuce picked from the garden.

Chop it all up and put into small bowls so we can choose our favorite items.

Build a salad that is “just right” and then crush some crackers to put on top like croutons, then add some mixed up ranch dressing.

THEN – for dessert, old-school pudding parfait! These are the non-homemade ingredients:

Mix ‘em up and put them in the fridge. And now? Some Inspiration TV where I can watch reruns of Little House on the Prairie and pretend I’m 10-years-old for an hour!

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