The order in which I hunt down and eat specific ingredients in my Grilled Chicken Salad:

1. Grilled chicken
   This one is a given. Always go for the meat first. It's sustaining, life giving, and tastes like meat. As the "Grilled Chicken Salad" name implies, the rest of the salad is simply a medium to hold up the meat.
   
   
2. Dressing-saturated croutons
   Everyone knows that dressing is, right after meat, the main reason you eat a Grilled Chicken Salad. However, since "dressing" isn't an ingredient you can hunt out discreetly, you have to seek out the most efficient dressing-carriers...the porous dressing-sponge known as "crouton." I will warn you here, mixing saturated croutons and unsaturated croutons is dangerous, as you will chomp down as if expecting a marshmallowy wet crouton, and instead crack your pearlies onto a granitesque dry one.
   
   
3. Cheese Shreds
   After picking out the meat and dressing-saturated wonderments, the next best tasty is the Cheese Shreds. Unfortunately, much like the dressing, Cheese Shreds are more a fluid than a solid, and tend to spread ubiquitously throughout, making them difficult to solo out without accidentally tining some of that yucky lettuce. Your best bet here is to use the side of your fork as a shovel, and scrape around the outside of the bowl or carryout container, as Dressing+Cheese creates a covalent bond with Container, and will result in a delightfully minimal cheese-to-lettuce ratio.
   
   
   
4. Non-Saturated Croutons
   Well, it's not great, but it beats lettuce and tomatoes (see "Lettuce and Tomatoes" below for further information).
   
   
5. Lettuce and Tomatoes
   Lettuce and tomatoes are the primordial stew from which the salad phylum evolved, and I think we owe L&T a debt of quiet gratitude for that. However, as far as vittles go, Lettuce and Tomatoes are less of an ingredient, and more of a penance for eating the other salad components.
   Author's note: For those who consider Lettuce a separate ingredient from Tomatoes, and one which merits its own address... well, you're wrong. By the time they've lived in the salad for a few minutes, they taste exactly the same. And shut up.
   
   
   6. Onions
   The only ingredient I seek out less than Lettuce and Tomatoes is Onions, which I actively avoid scooping up with every forkload. I still have no idea why raw Onions made it into the Salad Canon, but presume it was clever lobbying by the Red Onion Association, and certainly not due to consumer demand. These sour and spicy groundlings are magnificent in other applications, and delictable when cooked... but in a Salad only serve to make everything taste like onions, and to leave your breath reeking like humid shoe closet.
   

Other "improv" ingredients, such as broccoli, egg, and bacon bits, cannot be addressed here, as giving this apparently limitless collection of foodstuffs proper review would make the blog unweildy and even more unreadable. Please consult your local Salad provider for more information on these rogue additions.

Cheers,
Justin