Chicken Salad Days With the Yank

Remember this stuff?

It's called "Snow".

We don't have any this year, so I thought I'd post this pic in fond remembrance of 2010, 09, and 08...

For those of you with snow, feel free to have a hot chocolate on the house today! Or coffee, latte', whatever you'd like. In honor of your shoveling, snowblowing, plowing moments, the Cafe is giving out free drinks to anyone in a 2012 snow belt!  You guys rock!

Okay, on to chicken salad. We have chickens for eggs. I don't eat our chickens. We have in the past, but now life's a little busy to be spending summers putting up chickens... (note how carefully I did not use the word "butchering" so as not to offend anyone. Yes, I'm that sensitive to my friends' delicate needs)

Anyway, I'm fussy about chicken salad, too. I don't use canned chicken because it's got bits of ...stuff in it. I use boneless skinless chicken breasts and I pop them right into the kettle from the freezer, no need to thaw because we'll trim off any of those 'bits' of vein, fat, cartilage once they're cooked. It's way easier then.


Simple ingredients:

2 or 3 quarts Water
Chicken base or bouillon cubes (amount depends on how much water you use, follow label directions)
2 (or more) boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Celery, chopped
Salt, pepper to taste
Hellman's Mayonnaise

Easy-peasy, right?

Boil the chicken in the broth.  You can use the broth later to make chicken soup or as a base for some other soup stock. Remember that a lot of soup stocks blend chicken and beef to make a heartier broth. Yum!

When chicken is fully cooked (a fork will pierce it easily), remove from broth, rinse in cool water, and set aside to cool. Trim away any bits of fat, vein, cartilage until all you have left is white meat chicken. This is like a fifteen second job when chicken is cooked and you have a decent knife. Or you can borrow one of Missy's new knives. She's dangerous with them.

Chop up chicken. I like mine in small pieces but if you like chunks, that's fine. Add about 1/3-1/2 cup of chopped celery. Feel free to eat some while you chop, I love celery. If a few bits of celery leaf jump into the knife and then the bowl, this is perfectly okay, but not too many.

Add mayonnaise. Do this a little at a time to see how "moist" you want your salad. Tasting for quality control is encouraged.  Add salt and pepper to taste. We go heavy on the pepper (you might not need any salt because you boiled the chicken in a salt-water environment, very eco-friendly) and that flash of  heat brightens up the more bland taste of chicken.

I LOVE chicken salad on a lightly toasted buttered bagel, but if I'm low-carb I eat it on a bed of chopped lettuce and pray that my jeans will zipper the next week.

A side of broccoli/cabbage salad makes a nice "crunch" alongside the chicken chewiness.

I make this for Luke (finance boy in Boston) whenever he comes home. It was a favorite at Bridal Hall, too, the sweet bridal store where I sold wedding gowns for seven years.... Great family business and one of these days I will be doing a series with a bridal industry background, because it's HYSTERICAL...  you have no idea! I'm grinning, just thinking about it. Or maybe because my teeth really are too big for my head.

Whatever.

And I'm living a dual life right now because I'm working on a Christmas book.... While the world is morphing into Valentine's Day.  So I have to keep my head in "O Holy Night" while others are thinking "Lady in Red"...

:)

So if you hear rumors of Christmas music in Ruthy's house, they're all true!

This gratuitous pic is just to remind me of Christmas and how much I loved this cover on Matt and Callie's story.  Sigh...

And yes, that's a live link to take you straight to Amazon to get your own copy, LOL!