As with most salad-style dishes, ingredients can be adjusted to account for personal tastes and preferences.
Here is the original recipe they sent:
4-6 broccoli crowns
1/4 lb. bacon bits
2 cups shredded cabbage
2 cups craisins
3/4 cup sunflower seeds or pine nuts
1/2 red onion
Dressing:
2 cups mayonnaise
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp Italian Seasoning
1 Tbsp basil
2 pinches of salt
In a large mixing bowl place broccoli, craisins, red onion, cabbage and sunflower seeds. Cook up your bacon in diced pieces. Drain off most but not ALL the grease.
In a small mixing bowl mix up the ingredients for the dressing. Add to salad mix, then add remaining bacon with a little bacon grease.
Here's the thing: I adore broccoli. I also adore onions. Anything that mixes these two vital ingredients together is likely to be a huge hit with me.
So today I made my own rendition of their broccoli salad. I shredded half a cabbage...
...and cut up a bunch of red onions. These are the last of the red onions from our garden, and I was glad for an excuse to use them up, since they're starting to go bad (red onions don't have a long shelf life, at least not without a root cellar).
Broccoli. Yummm, lots of broccoli.
I threw in about a cup of sunflower seeds.
I had bacon bits in the freezer, so I scooped out about 3/4 cup and popped them in the microwave for a few seconds to thaw.
I'm not a huge fan of craisins, so I skipped that ingredient.
This is the resulting dry mix.
Then I mixed up the dressing. Altogether the recipe listed above makes a huge amount (think potluck!), so dial it back if you want a smaller amount. As it was, it filled my biggest mixing bowl almost to overflowing, so I ended up transferring things to a three-gallon pot so I could mix without slopping stuff over the edge.
But the results -- ooh la la -- absolutely delicious. Don and I have been snacking on it all day.
This would be an excellent summer dish for when the garden produce is ripening (not to mention a cool dish for hot weather), but since it has both broccoli and onions, I don't care what time of year it is -- it's going to become a staple in my kitchen repertoire.
