Laun/Pruett Recipe Collection
Doug Smith's Geek Salad

(As prepared by an authentic geek)
It's really simple and inexact-here's the general outline:
1 head Romaine lettuce (you may only need half of it, depending on how many you are feeding)
1 large cucumber, peeled & thin sliced
3 large or 4 medium bell peppers, halved equatorially and cut in strips
4 large or 5 medium tomatoes (I usually cut 'em in eighths)
1/2 a medium-sized red onion, sliced and the slices cut in half
1 can of sliced black olives (the smallest size: they're about an inch and a half tall by two inches in diameter)
You can use whole olives, if you prefer, but stay away from the chopped ones--they turn into paste in the
dressing.
1 package of feta cheese-not the pre-crumbled stuff, but the bricks that are about the size of two cigarette packs back-to-back. You can never have too much feta cheese, I have found, and there's more in the brick than in the pre-crumbled pack. Plus, once you've crumbed the brick, you get to lick your fingers! Yum!

Pepperoncini peppers to taste
Combine all of the above, including the juice from the olive can and the feta cheese pouch.
Get as much of that good liquid as you reasonably can into the salad, but don't dilute it by rinsing the containers into the salad! Just take what you can pour. If you're going to store this and transport it a distance, I recommend keeping the feta sealed in its pouch and on ice until it's time to serve, and then add it at the last minute, especially if A) you can't fit a large salad bowl in your cooler-the feta gets real soft and yucky otherwise; and B) you don't have a
tight-fitting, i.e. Tupperware-type, lid for your salad bowl. I also make up the dressing in a separate sealable container, such as a margarine tub, for the same reasons.

Dressing:
1/2 cup olive oil
2-3 heaping tablespoons oregano
3 tablespoons of either lemon juice or red wine vinegar (I use
vinegar, as Deb's allergic to citrus)
Black pepper. Lots of it?maybe half a teaspoon? I pour it on top of the liquid until it heaps up into a little pyramid, but not so much that the pyramid falls through into the oil. Stir the dressing really vigorously just before you pour it over the salad, or else the oil and vinegar/lemon juice don't mix and you get oregano
sludge at the bottom of the container.