Mama Africa's Recipes: The Words Best Salad

First of all, you need some lettuce. I have become obsessed with butter lettuce, and I have found what I think might be the world's best butter lettuce at....Costco, of all places. It comes two heads to a pack, and it is so fresh that it still has the roots attached. The whole thing is not even three bucks, and I usually get four salads from two heads.
Maybe this is a little wacky or whatever, but I have recently started eschewing salad dressing. Instead, I have started putting straight balsamic vinegar on my salads, and before you get super grossed out by that, it has to be a very particular balsamic vinegar, namely this one from Trader Joe's:

I could pour this balsamic vinegar onto a spoon and eat it straight. As you can see from this picture, I am already running low. As you can see from the picture above, I like to pour it straight onto the lettuce, rather than waiting to add the other toppings. This balsamic vinegar is so incredible that I swear to god, you do not need any other kind of dressing on your salad. Actually, you probably do not even need any other toppings on your salad, but that would be kind of weird to just eat lettuce and vinegar for lunch, very Ally McBeal of you, so next I say we add some more stuff:

Here are some fresh figs and some chopped up strawberries. Sometimes I use fresh figs and chopped up strawberries but sometimes I don't have fresh figs and chopped up strawberries, and in that case I use whatever fruit I have. Fruit on a salad is one of life's greatest pleasures, and if you disagree, then this is probably not the salad for you. Today I had no fresh figs or chopped up strawberries, so I threw some blueberries on instead and it was incredible. Frequently, I also add dried cherries.
After that, I add the cheese. This, needless to say, is the best part.

This is goat cheese, because I like the way it tastes with the strawberries. But sometimes I do not have goat cheese—are you sensing a theme here? I am really bad at grocery shopping—and then I use crumbled blue cheese instead. The crumbled blue cheese goes really well with the dried cherries, FYI, but then I think crumbled blue cheese goes well with anything, maybe even raw chicken that has been left on the kitchen counter in a moldy gym sock for four days. Okay, maybe not that.
Finally, for the pièce de résistance of my salad, I add some nuts. My nuts of choice are these incredible candied walnuts which are about five thousand dollars a bag at Trader Joe's, but you only need to add them sparingly to get a fantastic crunch.