Restaurant Recreations: Olive Garden Salad

By Ashleigh Schmitz

Who doesn't love Olive Garden salad? It's a scientific fact that no one can get enough of it (thank goodness for their unlimited portions). And that dressing? Yum!

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Luckily for our cravings Olive Garden is one of the kinder restaurants, posting recipes for many of its beloved dishes online (including the Venetian Apricot Chicken from the new Lighter Italian Fare menu, which has less than 575 calories). But noticeably absent is everyone's favorite pre-entrée salad (or in my case sometimes entrée). Bummer!

Thankfully the salad is easy to make at home. And while there are several copy-cat recipes for their famous Italian salad dressing on the interwebs, you can get rid of the trial and error chef-ery because their salad dressing is available by the bottle at Sam's Club. And honestly, I could eat cardboard if it was covered in that salad dressing.

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Ingredients:

  • 1 bag of iceberg salad lettuce

  • 4 - 5 sliced red onions

  • 4 - 6 black olives

  • 2 - 4 pepperoncini

  • ½ cup croutons

  • 1 small tomato, quartered

  • Freshly grated Romano cheese

Toss everything in a bowl with your desired amount of dressing and you've got a restaurant quality dinner salad. Now, if only we could find a way to make the bread sticks at home…

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