Salads to Go with BBQ

This salad with grilled vegetables has pieces of Mexican Frying Cheese and a Barbecue Ranch Dressing that tastes of summer. This blog post is sponsored by Hamilton Beach who are also generously giving a Searing Grill to one of my lucky readers. Scroll down to enter.

Update: The giveaway has ended.

I think a salad a day keeps the doctor away. Or at least, I must think that since I have a salad for lunch almost every day.

I fill my plate with greens and then topple on bits of leftovers or canned salmon or chickpeas. Then I add whatever crunchy cold vegetables I find in my crisper drawer, like cucumber, carrots and celery.

But when I’m making a salad for real, when I’m not just throwing bits of whatever onto a plate, I take the opportunity to make the ingredients special.

For this salad I marinated the vegetables in a red wine vinegar mixture and then put them on my counter top Hamilton Beach Searing Grill. When they were done, I took them off and added some Mexican Frying Cheese.

Have you tried this stuff? You cut big slices of it and then put it in the frying pan or on the grill. It gets soft on the inside but doesn’t get goopey on the outside. So it doesn’t fall through the grill grates. The smokey rich grilled cheese adds so much to the salad.

The grilled veggies and cheese go onto a pile of greens. And then the dressing. Oh the dressing. It’s pretty amazing. And so easy. It’s a BBQ Ranch Dressing made by mixing together one part barbecue sauce with three parts ranch dressing. It still tastes like ranch but with this summer tang. This ratio works equally well with Italian dressing instead of ranch dressing, if you want to give that a try instead.

And now you can enter here too when your own Hamilton Beach Searing Grill.

The Hamilton Beach Searing Grill is perfect for the times when my husband is monopolizing our outdoor grill and I want to make something quick for an appetizer. It’s also the perfect grill for those living in apartments that don’t allow outdoor grills, or for those who face snowy winter months, if you don’t want to have to shovel out your grill.