I'm Back... With Chicken Salad

With some encouragement from Rachel (The Sheldons), I have decided to return to maintaining a blog. Since I last did this I've added a few new hobbies. So this time around the blog is going to center primarily on beer, cooking and baking, television and movies. Technology is probably going to come up as well.

On to the chicken salad. I've wanted to make it for quite a while now. I don't really know why. One part is because it seems healthy. Who knows, it might actually be healthy, but either way I can walk around the house thinking "I could have eaten pizza, but I made something healthy". The other part is that I hate paying $5+/lb at the grocery store for chicken salad because usually it kind of sucks. At best I find most deli salads to be way too hit or miss to take the gamble. So I waited for chicken breasts to go on sale and then made my move. Here is what I used:

  • 1.5-2 lbs boneless skinless chicken breast, cubed and marinated in Italian salad dressing.
  • 1/2 - 3/4 cup real mayonnaise
  • 1 cup (2 stalks) diced celery
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 cup - sliced red grapes
  • 1/3 cup - crushed pecans
  • Juice from 1/2 lemon
Saute the chicken 5-6 minutes (or until cooked all the way through) in a skillet, drain any excess liquid and then cook it "dry" for another 2 minutes to add color. Empty the chicken into a large mixing bowl, add celery, salt and pepper. Squeeze lemon juice, add mayonnaise, stir thoroughly, add grapes and pecans, stir again and then serve.

You can probably add the ingredients in any order you want, but I figured the idea of having the grapes was to keep their original flavor for the complimentary sweet/salt/sour flavors in the chicken salad.

This recipe makes about 6 large sandwich size servings, maybe more. I split the leftovers with Lauren, so I don't know exactly what she got out of the portion she had. I'd estimate that when it was all said and done, this probably cost me $15 with a loaf of (Aunt Millie's 12 Grain) bread and some Swiss cheese and made about 3 lbs of chicken salad. So maybe it wasn't a whole lot cheaper than the grocery store, but at least I could be sure it didn't suck.

That photo is not the actual dish I made, but in the future I'll try to take pictures of the food I blog about.

1 comments:

Rach said...

Yum, sounds delicious. I think I'll try it, but I'll grill the chicken b/c I'm lazy and don't care to clean pans...also maybe a dash of paprika and tarragon. Swiss cheese...good choice.