Chicken Salad for Recipe Friday

Friday night and Saturday I’m attending a Women’s Retreat at my church. It is going to be awesome! Because we are a Lutheran church, we had to include potluck in the mix somehow. So for dinner on Friday night we are having a salad potluck. Well, I like a little protein in my diet and so I decided I wanted to bring chicken salad. This recipe is inspired by two different chicken salad recipes that I have had before. One I first had in Minnesota, made by my husband’s cousin’s wife Kris. The other is a recipe sold at our local Whole Foods. But I took my favorite parts of both recipes, added in some ingredients I thought would be a good addition, and this chicken salad recipe is the result.

Chicken Salad

Ingredients:

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cooked
2 small apples
2 stalks celery
2 cups sweet red grapes
¾ to 1 cup chopped pecans
¼ to ½ cup Light Miracle Whip
Juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp poppy seeds
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Chop chicken into small cubes. Remove any mushy spots from apples and chop into small pieces. Squeeze a small amount of lemon juice on the apples in a bowl to keep them from browning. Chop celery into small pieces. Wash grapes and cut each grape in half. Combine chicken, apples, celery, grapes, and pecans in a large bowl. Add poppy seeds, salt, and pepper and stir until well mixed. Add Miracle Whip and mix until coated. (I made this the night before for our Women’s Retreat, but didn’t add the Miracle Whip until the next morning. That’s why the picture is of the salad before the Miracle Whip.)

Note about chicken: I cooked my chicken breasts on my Traeger with just a little salt and pepper, but you can cook them any way that works for you. Boiling works very well, too. My local Safeway even has pre-cooked chicken breast in the deli that would work. Just make sure the chicken is cool before you chop it and mix it with the other ingredients. Also, you can add more chicken if you like your chicken salad with more meat.

Note about apples: I used pink lady apples, though if I had honey crisp I would have used those, but they aren’t in season yet. Any sweet, crisp apple will do.

Side note about spellcheck: When I hit the “Schedule” button, spellcheck told me I had an error. The only error noted by a red underline was the word “skinless” in the description of the chicken breast. When I clicked to see the correction, spellcheck suggested it was “sinless” chicken breast. I got a chuckle out of this, so I thought I’d share. I’m not sure how I would know if my chicken breast was sinless, so I left it “skinless.”