Salads a sure way to unintentionally over do the calories

 Yesterday we did the stupid thing, hit up Costco without having a clear plan for last nights tea.  I knew I needed chicken & haddock plus a bag of almonds for Ade to munch on over the next few months but I hadn't massively settled for tea plans.  I was thinking smoked haddock, spinach, poached egg and possibly a jacket spud to get Ades carb levels up.  In the end I went for their 1kg of huge prawns, bag of broccoli salad and jacket spuds. I sort of looked at the label on the broccoli salad and yes it's high on fat (if you don't know it comes with 2 sachets of onion sauce and a bag of mixed nuts and dried fruit to add to the mix) but we had plenty of spare calories to splurge on so I wasn't too particular and hadn't read that the calories were per very small portion sizes, not half an 850g bag each

Now I was thinking a bit when I "made" tea, I saved one of the sachets of onion sauce to use as a mayo replacement to go with the prawns and added a small drizzle of sriacha sauce to it, thinking it an easy way to "save" calories as I'd already be counting the whole of them as the salad.  It worked well and tea was really yummy.

I didn't weigh my spud as it was half the size of Ades but his was 380g so I counted it as 250 to be on the safe side.

So naked of sauce and nuts tea would have gone along the lines of

380g potato  369cal

200g prawns  210cal

300g salad (I added toms and cucumber to the plate) 75cal  Totalling 654 calories and would have been counted as 4 portions of veg. (Broccoli, carrot, tomato and cue, spud doesnt count towards 5 a day)

The fruit, nuts and sauce made the salad (and prawn dressing) 757 kcal, each!  There was nearly 51g of fat in each portion alone, thankfully I didn't add any extra mayo or fat to the potato otherwise we would have seriously gone over our recommended allowances.  As it is look at the figures, the salad dressing had more calories than the salad, prawns and a large spud.

I suppose the moral of the post is salads aren't always a low fat healthy option unless you properly analyse what you're intending to add to it before you do.

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