Winner Winner Curried Chicken Salad Dinner

First things first! The "Winner Winner" portion of today's post.

Congrats to Brooke for winning the Suddora Headband giveaway for declaring her goal: "I want to cut an hour off my marathon time"!  (The awesome training runs Brooke has been posting leave me no doubt she can do this.)

And now the Chicken Salad Dinner!

I've had this can of chicken in my cupboard for far too long and decided yesterday that I wanted to make Chicken Salad.  I wasted time perused Pinterest for awhile but never found any recipes that a) I had all the ingredients for, or b) sounded good to me.

So I did what any red-blooded American would do and I made up my own recipe based on about 5 of the ones I found.  (I'm not a good enough cook to completely wing it.)

I give you Curried Chicken Salad with Apples, Raisins and Almonds

Ingredients:

1 small red apple (I think I used a Gala apple)

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1/4 cup cold water

Large can chicken (about 2 cups cooked, chopped. Leftover rotisserie chicken would work great too)

1/4 cup chopped celery (about 1 small stalk) - not pictured because I threw it in at the last minute

1/2 cup light mayo (I imagine you could try regular mayo or Greek yogurt as well). Use more if you want a creamier salad.

1/4 cup golden raisins

1/2 tsp curry powder (add this much and if you want more curry flavor, add some more to taste after mixing it)

1/4 cup slivered almonds (or any chopped nuts will do)

salt, pepper

Directions:

1. Core and chop the apple, leaving the skin on.  Put it in a bowl with the lemon juice and water and set aside.

2. Add remaining ingredients in another bowl and gently mix.


3.  Drain the apples well and add them to the chicken mixture.

please excuse my horrible food photography skills

4.  Refrigerate for an hour or so to let the flavors blend.  Serve on a bed of lettuce, Ritz crackers (my personal crack of choice), bread, in a pita, on a croissant, whatever floats your boat.

This was probably one of the simplest recipes I've ever thrown together with just stuff I had in the house.  You could easily change it to suit your tastes by adding different fruit (I LOVE pineapple in chicken salad but you have to drain it very well), spices, nuts, etc.

Now a completely random question because we're on Mid-Winter Break from school but stuck at home because I didn't think ahead to plan a trip...Where would you go if you had a 4 day weekend? I'm thinking 4 days in the Mayan Riviera sounds perfect right about now.