Salads add interest and nutrients to any diet. A chef's salad is easy to order when you are eating out, and a bowl of lettuce added to your lunch or dinner makes you feel as though you have dined well—which you have. Salads offer bulk, fiber, vitamins and minerals, satisfaction, and good taste, all of which are very important. However, you need to be careful even when ordering or making a salad because some salads can hide a lot of cholesterol and carbohydrate, and the most innocent-looking fruit salad can hide a lot of fat in the dressing. So always analyze a salad (quietly to yourself, of course) before you eat it.

Some salad ingredients are so low in calories that you can eat up to a cup without counting them, so I always try to include them in salads whenever possible. They include chinese cabbage, cucumbers, endive, escarole, lettuce, parsley, dill pickles, radishes, and watercress.

A good tossed salad begins with clean, crisp greens. They lose texture and nutrients even when properly refrigerated so it is best to be careful when you are preparing them. They are also fragile and must be stored carefully. It is a good idea not to wash them until shortly before they are used. Everyone has different ideas about how to keep greens fresh. I like to clean them and remove as much of the water as possible, and then store them in a plastic container in the refrigerator until I need them. Some cooks like to wash them and wrap them in a damp towel and refrigerate them until used. If they are wilted you can sometimes bring greens back to a manageable state by soaking them in cold water for a short time and then drying them before they are used. Remember, you shouldn't add the dressing until just before the salad is served because the dressing will wilt the greens.

Hard-cooked egg yolks should not be used in a salad on a low-cholesterol diabetic diet because of the cholesterol in the egg yolks. If you want chopped whole eggs in your salad, you can cook liquid egg substitute in the microwave oven or the top of a double boiler, let it return to room temperature, and then chop it into cubes for use in salads. I generally just hard-cook the eggs, discard the egg yolks, and chop the whites for salad. You can use the egg yolks to garnish the salad, and anyone who doesn't need to watch their cholesterol intake can eat them. Don't feel guilty if you throw away the yolks. Just tell yourself you are discarding cholesterol and it gets easier every time you do it.

There are some good low-calorie salad dressings on the market that are suitable for a low-cholesterol diabetic recipe. However, they hardly ever contain vegetable oil because of the calories, and you do need some polyunsaturated vegetable oils in your diet. Anyone on a low-cholesterol diabetic diet has a hard time balancing the amount of vegetable oil needed for a low-cholesterol diet with the number of fat exchanges on the diabetic diet. Talk to your doctor about it and see which is the most important—getting the polyunsaturated vegetable oil or restricting your fat intake.

Sour cream is also a no-no on a low-cholesterol diet and a lot of very good dressings contain sour cream. You can generally substitute low-fat yogurt for sour cream in most recipes with good results. Again, it is a good idea to read the list of ingredients on the container before you buy salad dressing to be sure they don't contain anything that shouldn't be used on a low-cholesterol diet—as well as honey or sugar, or other things that shouldn't be used on a diabetic diet. If you are in doubt about your favorite dressing, read the label; you may be happily surprised.

Fruits and vegetables—except for coconut and coconut oil and palm oil—do not have any cholesterol. You are free to use any fruits and vegetables in a salad that will fit into your diabetic diet. I haven't used any avocados in the recipes because they are so high in fat exchanges that they are hard to fit into a diabetic diet pattern. However, if you like them well enough that you are willing to use your fat exchanges for them, feel perfectly free to do so; they are a good source of fiber, which is a plus. I also have not used grapefruit or oranges because I feel that most diabetics use them so often and are so used to eating them that I should concentrate on salads that might be a little different. Grapefruit sections or orange sections on a lettuce leaf is a perfect salad for both the low-cholesterol and diabetic diets.

Equal (aspartame) sugar substitute has been used a great deal in this chapter because I like to use it whenever possible, but feel free to use your own favorite sugar substitute. Each packet of Equal is equal to 2 teaspoons sugar—use your own favorite sugar substitute accordingly.