What's for Lunch?

I post about our nightly dinners all week long, so today for a change of pace, I thought I'd bring you in on lunch. Most days lunch is composed of leftovers, sandwiches, soup, and salad. You know, lunch food. Most days. On my worst days I confess to feeding my children less healthy varieties of food. Kid food. Easy Mac, hot dogs, fish sticks. That's the ugly truth. : ) I promise that I always serve lunch with a fruit and/or vegetable. It eases my conscience. Of course, I don't eat that stuff. Not me. It's not health-see (as my daughter would say).

So today, while my children were eating "kid food", I whipped up a Neptune Salad Sandwich. What is Neptune Salad, you might ask. Well, Neptune Salad is basically crab salad made with that fake crab stuff + green onions + celery + mayo. When I was in college, I worked as a "deli girl". Slicing lunch meat, proofing and baking bread, and frying up the donuts. Man, you haven't lived until you've stood over a fryer at 5 a.m., watching globs of donut dough bob up and down in oil while sweating 151 out of your pores. What does this story have to do with my lunch today? Nothing. I just got lost in the deli memories for a moment. Wow, thank goodness I'm not doing that anymore!

Anywhoo...an additional "deli girl" responsibility was to make the salads we sold from the deli case. Neptune Salad was one of these salads. I assume they called it "Neptune" because they couldn't officially call it "Crab Salad" when crab was not actually an ingredient. Also, it sounds better than Fish-Disguised-As-Crab Salad. I found some of this imitation crab on sale at the grocery this week and I re-created that Neptune salad from my deli years, only on a smaller and healthier scale.

I put 1/2 cup of imitation crab meat, 1 tablespoon of light mayo, 1 sliced green onion, and some chopped celery in a bowl. I used a straight-edged scraper tool to both chop and mix the salad in one motion.


Now I season to taste. First a little lime juice, some pepper, celery salt, a squirt of mustard. I didn't love the mustard...didn't ruin it...but I could've done without it. Gotta love the trial and error.


When I finally got the flavor right, I spread the Neptune Salad between a couple slices of wheat bread and topped with some lettuce. And that's lunch!


If you're counting points, that's 2 points for the "crab" + 1 point for the light mayo = 3 pts.