Hey there. Haven’t fallen off the face of the planet–just spent the last few months buying a house and moving into said house. Needless to say, things have been busier than normal.
However, I’ve been trying to do a few recipes here and there throughout the process, so there’s content coming at some point. So before you get to see the new (and hopefully VERY permanent) kitchen background, you’ll still get a few from the old apartment. Here’s one of those, 2-11: Santiago Chicken Salad.
In preparation for moving, we were looking for easy recipes that didn’t involve a lot of cooking or prep work. A lot of Simply Delicious recipes tend to be very heavy and calorie-dense–this one was a light option that involved very minimal work.
They suggest you can swap the meat out for ham if you choose. If you haven’t noticed from recent posts, we’re mostly going meatless these days, so I’ll be swapping real chicken for one of the many meatless options you can find.
Ingredients. I went with Beyond strips for my meatless chicken, since the recipe called for broiled skinless/boneless chicken cut into strips. Ta-da! Most of the hard work has already been done. Everything else is what’s called for in the recipe, with the inclusion of some pita bread to serve it with. By using meatless strips instead of real chicken, this salad is now vegan (if that’s something you’re interested in).
Honestly, it doesn’t look all that different than real frozen/processed chicken. Tastewise, it’s less gamey than real chicken, but I don’t even find myself wanting the real stuff anymore (gave up meat more than a year ago).
The strips seemed like they’d be too big for the salad, so I cut them up into cubes.
Drained and rinsed the corn–this one was fire-roasted for extra flavor.đ„
Didn’t have a white onion, so yellow will have to do. White gives a better flavor for salads/fajitas, but yellow can work if that’s all you have.
Slicing up the red bell pepper. Easiest method I’ve found is to take off the top and bottom of the pepper, pull out the seeds, make one slice down the middle to unroll it into a “pepper-sheet”, and then slice off of that. If you need a dice, turn the slices 90 degrees and make one more set of cuts.
After prepping the onions, “chicken”, peppers, and cucumber.
Sliced the mushrooms thinly.
I can’t help but show off when I slice avocado. Too bad the picture was blurry.
The avocado was a bit brown in spots, but it’ll work fine for this salad.
Tossing in the other ingredients.
After mixing it all up. Pretty colorful.
Blending the dressing ingredients. It doesn’t look or smell much different than a typical oil/vinegar salad dressing, maybe a bit spicier due to the chili powder.
After tossing with the dressing. Looks good, but we could dress this up even more.
Final bowl, complete with one additional ingredient (black olives) and some decorative (yet functional) pita bread. For a late spring/early summer lunch with very little prep, it was pretty good. Consider this a good dish for any upcoming summer parties or even just a use for leftover stuff in the fridge/pantry.
Grade: A-
