Unholy Union Salad: White Anchovy and Blue Cheese Salad

This is a salad that I would like to call: The Unholy Union because it combines

Wild Planet White Anchovies:

A small oily fish in a tin that tastes like a more mild version of sardines.

Fourme d'Ambert:

A blue cheese that my boyfriend describes as tasting like the smell of a barn in Wisconsin. The cheesiest state in the union. Is that really a bad thing? I think not.

The result is this:

Perhaps the most awesome salad ever.

I decided that I needed more vegetable intake. I have fiber goals in life. Anyway, salad seemed to be a good way to go since it's pretty much nothing but fiber. Salad has always been a little hard for me to get into because it's physically hard to eat. It's like a little kid with spaghetti, I get dressing all over my clothes and my face. I needed a gateway into salad eating and that gateway ended up being sardines.

I found a recipe for an awesome sardine salad that is now currently defunct, but here's a (hopefully working) link to the cached version.

Mine had evolved from the original version which I'll repost here (incase there's ever a day the cached version doesn't work.)

Mediterranean Sardine Salad With Avocado

Makes 1 serving

1 can of sardines packed in olive oil (preferably including bones)
1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 large handful spinach
1 tomato, sliced into 8 wedges
1/4 small red onion, thinly sliced
1 oz feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 ripe avocado, cut into cubed and scooped out of its skin
Squeeze of lemon juice (optional)

Open the can of sardines and pour one tablespoon of the olive oil in the can into a bowl. Slowly add the balsamic vinegar as you whisk furiously with a fork until you have an emulsified vinaigrette. Add the spinach, tomato, and red onion to the bowl and toss until the vinaigrette is evenly distributed. Roughly cut the sardines into big chunks in the can. Top your salad with the half the sardines (or all of them if you’re hungry), feta, avocado cubes, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Prepare to feel awesome.

My deviations for the Unholy Union salad are as follows:

- 1/2 a tin of white anchovies packed in oil

- whatever salad greens I happen to have on me

- 3-4 yellow campari tomatoes sliced into 4-6 wedges each (I think they're sweeter than red tomatoes)

- about a 1Tbsp chopped red onion

- 2-3 tsps chopped Fourme d'Ambert

Basil leaves (optional) 

What I found with my anchovies was that the "oil" they were packed in was actually quite thin so I needed to use my own olive oil instead of the oil from the fish tin - but when you can use the fish tin oil, go for it - it tastes awesome. Getting to this point was a fluke as I just ran out of goat cheese and I had this crazy awesome strong tasting bleu cheese that I could only eat in small amounts, it's use for a salad fit perfectly. As for fixing my original problem with salad which was it being physically to messy to eat, the solution was to get a bowl large enough so that it functioned like a trough. Yep. I'd be right at home in a barn in Wisconsin.