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I should patent this salad. Takes about 10 minutes to make if you have lettuce and tofu prepped (that takes about 30 minutes weekly…).
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Lettuce, carrots, tomato, cucumber, pickled kalamata olives (store bought), pickled jalapenos (fresh pickled at home), baked diced seasoned tofu, avocado. Dressing is just lemon juice, salt and pepper, I don't like fancy dressings.
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The key is that I buy 3 heads of fresh lettuce every couple of weeks at the farmer's market, and immediately wash, chop, and spin-dry them, and bag in a large ziplock with some paper towels. That's what makes the salad -- really good and fresh/crisp lettuce as the base.
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I'd say this is equivalent or better than a Sweetgreens type lunch salad at 20% of the cost. I'd guess this costs me about $2 and it costs about $10 at a salad chain place.
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Wife does the jalapeno pickling and the tofu seasoning. The tofu takes some iterations to get right, but basically squeeze out water under a heavy weight, dice, spritz with oil, season with umami seasoning, nutritional yeast or just salt and pepper, bake at 450 for ~25min.
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It's tempting to do lots of batch prep, and even make 80% done salads in individual portions and only add the last 20%, but I've found that kinda screws up the freshness a bit. Take the 10 minutes... 30-70 prep/real-time is significantly better than 80-20.
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At the very least, never do tomatoes ahead of time. Only fresh chopped room-temperature tomatoes. Refrigerating tomatoes, or worse, refrigerating chopped ones, is the cardinal sin of veg food. And use tomatoes on the tart side, not sweet. I dislike current rise of sweet tomatoes.
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