The Hofreiters

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Chicken salad

I love chicken salad! It's another one of those things that I love but have never ever made before. My mom makes an awesome chicken salad, one of her famous non recipe foods, so I always just eat it when she makes it and dream of it when she doesn't. Tonight I got brave and decided that chicken salad only has a handful of ingredients, so how hard can it really be? The answer, thank God, is not hard.

You have a lot of options with chicken salad, it's the kind of thing that pretty much as long as it has chicken and some kind of dressing holding it together you can call it chicken salad and make it to suit your tastes or needs. 

I used three boneless skinless chicken boobs and covered them in olive oil. I baked them for about 30 min at 350 with a handful of diced onions, 2 cloves of chopped garlic, a little kosher salt and black pepper, and the juice from half of a lemon. 



I decided to try the new (I think it's new) Hellman's Mayonnaise with Olive Oil. There is another recipe I want to try that suggests using it so I figured it might be good in the chicken salad too. 


I chopped up the chicken and mixed in a couple of heaping spoonfuls of mayo until the chicken was nicely coated, then I added chopped pecans and red seedless grapes that I had cut in half. I added a little more mayo as I went and some salt and pepper until I had the flavor and texture I was looking for. See chicken salad is a non recipe food. Dump chopped up chicken, mayo, and whatever else you want in a bowl and stir. Ta Da, chicken salad.


My two favorite ways to eat chicken salad are on a croissant or on multigrain bread with lots of seeds and nuts in it. I don't have any weird hippy bread so a croissant it was. 


It was really super easy and the longest part was cooking the chicken. You could totally use a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and save a lot of time. I just had chicken waiting to be cooked and I'm kind of into that sort of thing.