This Doughnut Salad Recipe Proves You've Been Eating The Salad Wrong Way For Years

I have a confession to make: I don't really like salad. At least, not the healthy kind. You know what I'm talking about: it's crunchy, colorful, and tastes like air. But, this vintage doughnut salad recipe floating around Twitter right now proves that you can totally make any kind of salad you want. And, no one can stop you because you're a grown-ass woman. If you want to put doughnuts in your salad, that's your right. While some things really shouldn't be combined, like Buffalo sauce and lattés, I'm all about doughnuts and salad. Because, here's the thing, anything qualifies as a salad as long as there is lettuce involved.

Political Scientist Paul Fairie tweeted an epic vintage doughnut salad recipe that proves salad wasn't always so boring, and he said in his tweet, "If this can be a salad, you can be anything." Kind of like Lady Gaga's inspiration for "Born This Way" was her mom telling her when she was a kid that "We are all born superstars." She totally believed that was true, and look at her now. Just sayin'.

The lesson here is, never doubt that you are a superstar, and that doughnut salads are real. While the doughnut salad wasn't born that way, lettuce and doughnuts found their true purpose in life when they decided to pair up. This particular recipe is for a prune and cream cheese doughnut salad, and it's next level.

So! To make this throwback appetizer you'll need a half pound of cream cheese, four prunes, four doughnuts, and four lettuce leaves. Next, quarter the doughnuts, spread cream cheese on the cut ends, and put the doughnuts back together. Then, place each doughnut on a lettuce leaf, and put a cream cheese stuffed prune on the side of each doughnut. Voila! You have a salad that also doubles as a dessert for four people.

Bonus point if you also serve the doughnut salad with some kind of weird jello that has fruit and cottage cheese trapped in the gelatin — the kind a distant relative, or your grandma, brought over on Thanksgiving when you were a kid.

OK, OK, maybe this is really a dessert with a lettuce garnish, but let's not get technical about it. It has lettuce, so it's salad. Those are the rules, which I completely made up because I can. If putting the words "doughnut" and "salad" together is not your jam, you can eat the doughnut separately and then roll the prune up in the lettuce leaf like it's a sophisticated lettuce wrap.

I assume lettuce wraps weren't a thing when this throwback recipe was written so I can forgive the error in instruction if you can. While people on Twitter were confused by the doughnut salad (clearly they don't have my salad rule book), others — drunk on this new found freedom — quickly started making up their own "salad" recipes.

And, one Twitter user quickly pointed out the absence of lettuce (he totally gets it) and offered a solution.

This next person had the same question as me. Surely the doughnut salad would be more presentable if the prune was inside the doughnut hole, kind of like that bird in the nest egg and toast thingy. Why are we making the prune sit on the sidelines?

Now you can totally throw away your salad rule book because, apparently, the word "salad" just means chopped. Anything you chop and put in a bowl, or on a plate, is a salad. I can admit when I am wrong, and I was wrong about needing to include lettuce for something to classified as a salad. Clearly everyone has a different level of salad definition comfort, and that's OK.

And, perhaps whomever wrote this recipe did so after imbuing in some typical '70s-style fun. You know, because there was no Taco Bell back in the old days. People had to get creative AF, and the doughnut salad definitely gets a C for creativity.

Honestly, this recipe does not seem weird to me at all because I grew up in the Midwest where throwing some random foods together and calling it a salad was totally normal, like this apple doughnut salad recipe. But, why so many prunes in the '70s? This must have been before the invention of those fiber powders adults put in their water.

And, in the Midwest, all the grownups drank vodka salad while making the kids eat the weird food. Who were we to question them? They were in charge of the salad. They had all of the power.

In all seriousness, now that I have freed you from the prison of mainstream society's current definition of salad, feel free to go wild and whip up any kind of salad you want for the holidays, or just for a Thursday.

If getting creative in the kitchen isn't your thing, you can also follow these candy and drink recipe parings for your Halloween 2017 party (none of them include prunes) and call them salad. Because, everything is salad as long as that's what you call it. If anyone questions you just read them this definition of salad from the dictionary: Salad, small pieces of food usually mixed with a dressing.

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