Mostly Pinterest functions to make me feel bad about myself. My hair, my nails, my smoky-eye abilities, the scarcity of silk trench coats in my closet, and oh my god my dinners.

It's not that my dinners are bad; they're usually pretty good ifIdosaysomyself - they're just not...I don't know, accessorized. Surrounded with little trimmings of locally sourced flower buds, or resting on snow-white plates with attractive little drip-drops of olive oil scattered about the edges, or whatever. (A caveat: lately my dinners have actually been rawther lovely, but that's because of Trader Joe's, not because of any exceptional food-styling abilities on my part.)

Anyway, this dinner - actually a "brinner,"* if we're being specific - is, like, the Kirsten Bell of meals (I'm watching Frozen with Indy right now - try not to be shocked - and this is the first cute actress who popped to mind, but it actually makes sense because she seems like, were she a food, she would be quite delicious).

When Indy and I were in California together, we stopped into a little cafe in a very expensive town (the town that it turned out would permit us to buy a one-room cabin with a ladder instead of a staircase). The sandwich that I got in that cafe - which was seventeen dollars and consisted of exactly what you traditionally find in sandwiches and not, as one might imagine, diamonds - should have perhaps indicated to me that we were in FancyLand, but I was less dismayed by the price tag of that sandwich than you might have expected, because oh the side salad that it came with.

Now, I recognize that food that you get in restaurants is generally good because it's full of secret things like All Of The Butter, and is often quite tough to replicate at home. But this little side salad seemed to me to be just a whole bunch of pretty simple stuff mixed together, and so I took out my handy little notepad, jotted down the ingredients that I could see, and when I got home:

made it.