Weight Watching Raspberry Salad

This is one of my favorite salads and I have it at least once a week. It has certain ingredients in it that you have to have, but you can certainly change things to suit yourself.

Here are the ingredients(roughly)

1 bag mixed greens, butter lettuce, or romaine if that is all you have.

A couple of thin slices of red onion cut into long pieces

1/4 cup or so of crumbled blue cheese

1/4 cup slivered almonds

1/3 cup cut up raspberries, strawberries, grapes, mandarin oranges (any fruit you might like)

spray oil (such as Pam)

Special ingredient-Colvita balsamic raspberry glace ( a reduced raspberry vinegar that is a little sweet and thick like syrup) This is expensive at nearly $9 a bottle, but so worth it.

2-3 sweetner packets

This is the special ingredient in the bottle.

If using pre-packaged lettuce, I usually rinse it and let it dry and place it in a bowl. Add the onion and the blue cheese. Meanwhile put about 1 tablespoon of sugar in a small fry pan along with the slivered almonds and wait for sugar to melt and it will stick to the toasted almonds. Do not walk off and forget these as they burn quickly. Let them cool completely before putting in salad.(Sometimes they clump together, so just break them up)

Add the fruit and the cooled almonds to the salad mix and drizzle glace across the top and toss. Add sugar substitute packet and mix. You can alway add more glace or sugar so do it sparingly until you get the taste you want. I spray a few shots of oil over the top and continue to mix. It just keeps the glace from being too strong and also keeps from having too much oil in the salad.

This raspberry glace is great straight over blanched asparagus or green beans too.