The Baby Wedge Salad with Avocado and Pickled Onions caught my eye immediately when Deb posted it to the blog this spring. I like to do taco night, but I struggle with a side dish. Last summer I was throwing together corn salads, which is fine but not quite what I was looking for. Normally I don’t gravitate towards iceberg lettuce, but the form factor intrigued me and I knew this would feel light and refreshing in the summer.

Overall this dish was a winner! The presentation is really fun, and the crunch of the iceberg is great with the various other toppings. It’ll look like too much of everything, but you want that abundance with iceberg. Especially since there isn’t really a dressing on this.

The one major hitch I ran into was that I accidentally burned the first batch of pepitas. If you’re also starting with roasted ones, start that one minute timer the second you start to see bubbling, and be ready to take them off the heat right away.

I also encountered a minor hitch, which was that I didn’t have enough red wine vinegar to pickle the onions. So I just used some from a big jar of them we keep in the fridge. The flavor profile isn’t quite the same since I made these with white vinegar, but I don’t think we missed much.