How to Make the Perfect Salad

Step 1: Wake up awesome, put on a salad-getting hat, and journey to Whole Foods Market. 

Step 2: Approach the hot and cold bar section and steel yourself against its vast offering. The masaman curry chicken and quinoa will try to distract you from your goal, but you are a formidable salad-goer so forge ahead (in the end, you will get the curry chicken and quinoa for later. It will be our secret). 

Step 3: Which will it be? Field greens mix, Spinach, or Romaine? I'm a spinach girl, myself, but please don't let that stop you from going Iceberg crazy.

Step 4: Now that you have assembled your items in the little bowl, you probably want a little something to balance out the bitter feta cheese. Cranberries, raisins, granola, oh my! Yes. Who can pass up a trail mix bar? Maybe you like to sprinkle nuts and grains on your salad, maybe you like to bag them up by the pound and save them to snack on when you're up late. Either way, let's assume a visit to the trail mix bar is a critical component.

Step 5: It just got real, wicked. The dessert bar is wicked good and now you are calculating how many spin or zumba classes it will take to burn off the luxury of dark berries wrapped in whipped cream and vanilla cake. The struggle is real.

Step 5: So you survived the dessert bar. But what about the other meals of the day? To hummus or not to hummus, that is the question.

Step 7: Arden's Garden is Atlanta's finest juice and smoothie outfit and maybe you can only eat your salads in juice form at the moment because your braces were just tightened or you want a detox. Grab a few bottles.

Step 7: What goes best with a good salad? A new maxi dress, of course. Blue maybe?

Step 9: And lemonade because well, there really is no justifiable reason. Just because it's pink and it's lemonade.

Step 10:  Leave the cold drink area and locate your mom in the middle of the store curiously eyeing the wine aisle.

Step 11: Pause for a summer salad selfie because you've done a great job.

Step 12: Once you pull your mom away from the wine aisle, you can ring up the bounty.

Step 13: Load the biodegradable paper bags or the reusable grocery bags you brought from home into the car and take a weird selfie with your mom who, by now, is complaining about the price of everything at Whole Foods except for the wine.