first truly keto meal

There's a lot going on, here: lettuce, cukes, cherry tomatoes, blue cheese, mixed nuts (no cashews), bacon, chicken, dried onions, chives, and homemade strawberry vinaigrette. Would have loved to add something sweet like raisins and/or Mandarin oranges, but among fruits, berries are considered keto (in moderation) while other fruits generally are not. Dried fruits, in particular, are bad on keto: the lack of water only serves to concentrate the carbs that are left in the flesh of the fruit: a handful of raisins is therefore way carbier than a handful of grapes. This is why some keto-heads call dried fruit "carb bombs."

I learned something, too, while making the dressing: xanthan gum is a stabilizer as much as a thickener. Add it to oil, use a stick blender, and you've got something awfully close to mayonnaise. Because there's no egg, the mix ends up tasting rather bland (xanthan gum, I find, is the enemy of umami), so when making a vinaigrette, either go easy on the xanthan gum or use a more traditional emulsifier like egg yolks or mustard. Mixed in with my salad ingredients, the dressing tastes fine, but by itself, it's kind of meh. Lesson learned: next time I make vinaigrette, no xanthan gum.

This is a good, hearty salad, and a nice followup to a simple morning keto shake. (I tweaked the shake recipe, by the way, so it tastes much better now.)