Meatless Monday, Grandma-style

The trio salad ... it's the quintessential "healthy" option at many an old people restaurant. You know, the family-owned joints that you visit when Grandma wants to go to lunch and she's paying.

Oh. Wait. Maybe that's just me.

Back to lunch. My meal for this Meatless Monday was inspired by the trio salads that my grandma used to get back in the day. (Now, we just split a meal and add a salad. We're cool like that.) The salads usually came with tuna salad, cottage cheese and either egg or chicken salad. One of the salads was inevitably served in a scooped out tomato and there was a bed of pale-colored iceberg for the rest.

Having purchased the most-delicious tomatoes from the farmers market, I didn't want to waste any of the meat by scooping it out. Sliced tomatoes for me! I also had some bell peppers on hand and decided that they would be a nice accompaniment for my salads - low-fat cottage cheese and egg salad.

I don't want to brag but this egg salad was pretty awesome. Simple flavors but good flavors. I hard-boiled two eggs and three whites. Once the eggs were cool, I chopped 'em up and added dijon mustard (~1 teaspoon) and some low-fat mayonnaise (~1.5 tablespoons). Seasonings were fairly simple - just white pepper and salt. This batch makes two decent-sized servings or three baby servings. (It's a baby serving in the photo.)

My only regret with this meal was not having any toast, a wrap or some crackers to eat with it all. I did have some roasted chickpeas (Operation: Clean Out the Pantry!) for crunch but you can't exactly scoop some egg salad on a chickpea. At least not daintily. And that, my friends, would not make Grandma very happy.