With the insanity of this week (frosh week at Carleton, I work everyday!) I am absolutely shocked that I managed to find any time to make any sort of food other than soup noodles.  Since I am completely exhausted, I will keep this post short and sweet, before my eyeballs drop out of my head and decide to take a quick power nap on my keyboard.

This salad was inspired by the Mexican Tostada Salad found in the September issue of Canadian Living.  I say “inspired by” only because I made a few alterations.  One of these alterations was to make my own crispy version of tortilla chips.  As I discovered when I made my chicken tortilla soup back in May, a great way to make a quick snack/meal helper-outer is simply to slice up flour tortillas and fry them on the stove.  They come out perfectly browned and deliciously crunchy; in this case they served as the perfect replacement to the tostadas required in the original recipe.  Also, I don’t know what tostadas actually are…  Now, the original recipe in Canadian Living identified this dish as vegetarian and required you add some sort of protein replacement thinger.  Never a fan of any protein replacement (tofu=disaster), I fried up some ground beef to add to the mix.  Another change I made was to not put salsa into the recipe (I got enough tomato taste from the tomato juice and sliced plum tomatoes).  Finally, rather than layering all the fun ingredients, I just kind of tossed them around in one of our popcorn bowls and voila!  Salad is complete.  Delicious.