Since it hasn’t snowed in at least 12 hours here in NYC, it means I can finally get out of the house and back to business. The superhero business of unmasking Foodiness™ for you! And since we got the marshmallow peeps-biofueled snow plow up and running this year here at the Foodiness™ Fallout Shelter, I can finally get out to the garage. So in this episode of Let’s Get Real, I take the Foodiness™ Time Machine out of storage, and take a trip down the salad rabbit hole. Down and back to where the grilled chicken salads grow, back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Back to the place where we’re all fearfully afraid of fat, and a dry, tough, tasteless grilled chicken breast is the supposed answer to our chubby prayers. Especially if it’s served over mixed greens, with fat-free raspberry-balsamic-poppyseed-ranch dressing. And oat-bran crackers.

It lives down there, lurking, waiting for an extinction or an obsolescence that never seems to come. Because it never dies, somewhere there’s someone ordering a grilled chicken salad, and that one person keeps it alive. There’s a whole colony of irrelevant salads living down there, the Waldorf, the iceberg wedge, the jello…they’re all on life support, but the grilled chicken is the strongest.

But once we get down there, to the place where the most unfortunate chicken parts sleep on their downy beds of salad, we’re going to do a little housecleaning, and eradicate the most famous salad of that era, and install a new queen of the overexposed salad world, the gem of the 20-teens, the Kale Salad. Because as overexposed and cliche as it may be, it’s so much better than anything else ever gone as mainstream, as quickly, in the salad column of the chain restaurant menu.

And while we’re in the Time Machine, I’ll show you around the newly renovated pantry and kitchen, and maybe we’ll throw together a winter vegetable salad, sound good? Just because its winter, it doesn’t mean your salad eating has to stop. You just need a little imagination, guidance, dare I say mentoring…perhaps? I’m here for you, I’m your mentor, and if you’ll just listen to and do every single thing I say and pay close attention, you could learn something.

So if you don’t want to eat salad sh*t or look like an un-mentored buffoon, listen to this episode of Let’s Get Real, and improve yourself.