BLT salad with buttermilk dressing

Easy as pie and quick as arithmatic.  Well, this recipe also told me to make my own croutons and I nixed that idea since it was 8 pm when we got done with our appointment to get the windows measured and decide on blinds for the house.  Justin threw some steaks on (ribeye for him, filet for me...we still have a whole bunch left from when I posted THIS) when the lady left, and I wanted to veer away from the macaroni and cheese side that he started, so I made myself a good lookin' little salad for my side. 

I had this recipe laid out because I had a ton of extra buttermilk from making a ranch sauce the previous week so I wanted to use as much of it as possible before it went bad.  We had picked a ton of lettuce from the garden, and I always have bacon on hand, so my only problem was that I had no tomatoes.  Don't fret...I found some.  In the potato salad I made last week.  Yep, I dug them out, rinsed them off (read: licked the potato salad off of them), and put them in my salad.  Justin was highly amused when he asked for some for his salad and I told him how I got them. You gotta do what you gotta do....

8 strips bacon (I used 6 pieces of turkey bacon)
1/3 cup buttermilk
3 T mayo (I used fat free)
2 T cider vinegar
1 scallion, thinly sliced
lettuce
cherry tomatoes
croutons (I used fat free garlic but if you want to make your own use 1/2 a baguette sliced up, toss it with 2 T olive oil and freshly ground salt and pepper before baking until golden brown)

Cook bacon as normal and pat dry. 

Whisk buttermilk, mayo, vinegar, and scallion together.  Or use one of these handy dandy dressing mixer dealies that my mom got me a few years ago.  Its got a whisker thing on the bottom to pull up and down that churns and mixes your ingredients for any dressing you want to make.

It's even got directions around the side that give you levels to fill ingredients to in order to make italian, french, caesar, etc. NEATO!!

OK, now you want to toss your lettuce, bacon, tomatoes, croutons, and dressing together and flavor with ground pepper....and you've got yourself a couple of nice little side salads, or a very large dinner salad!

Fat Stats (this makes 4 servings):
355 calories
17 g fat
11.9 g protein
38.4 g carbs

These fat stats are for the original recipe which uses full fat bacon, homemade oiled up croutons, and full fat mayo in the dressing.  I would say this contained more like 200 calories and 5 g of fat with the modifications I made.