Plan Your Meetings

Salad days: April 2007 Morsel

As we are heading into spring, let’s take a fresh look at something we all say we like (but in reality would prefer a burger and fries to) — an entree salad. We all want to take weight off the caboose, so here is what I recommend to make salads a little more palatable:

For starters, tell the chef to chop the lettuce instead of putting out big chunks that are impossible to eat. For a luncheon, do a chopped salad bar with various ingredients such as julienne fried chicken, lemon pepper grilled chicken, skirt steak and shrimp. Give this salad bar a nice touch with chives, cilantro and mint.

Finish off the buffet with a choice of soups. Don’t worry about having soup on a hot summer day; folks always will eat soup. My recommendations are wild mushroom, tomato basil and chili. (If your audience is primarily men, you never can go wrong with chili.)

Follow this menu for a healthy, fun lunch, and it will allow you to splurge on dessert.

— Claire R. Gould

Claire R. Gould is the owner of Rx for Catering, LLC, a culinary and logistics company that works globally negotiating and designing menus for meetings and events. Her company has done work for Coca-Cola, IBM, Honeywell and Randstad, among others. Gould teaches and writes about culinary and banquet trends and topics. If you have any feedback for her, please leave a comment below.