Sweet Chicken Salad

My favorite thing to do with leftover chicken is make chicken salad. It’s also my favorite thing to do when I have a couple extra stalks of celery I don’t know what to do with. Or when I want to finish off a jar of mayonnaise. Or crack the seal on a new one. Yeah, I don’t need a lot of convincing, truth be told. Chicken salad is awesome.

And like its lettuce-based cousin, Regular Salad, the best part about chicken salad is that it’s so flexible. Just a couple of base ingredients, and beyond that you can add practically anything. Today, it shall be sweet!

 

Base ingredient number one is chicken, of course. Can’t really negotiate on that one. I had to boil my two chicken breasts real quick, since I wasn’t even pretending to be using up leftover ingredients with this batch, but perhaps you’ll already have some shredded chicken ready to go.

 

Base ingredient number two is celery. Actually I know people who make chicken salad without celery, but they are blasphemers. As for me and my house, we will serve it with celery. Two stalks, specifically, cut lengthwise and diced.

 

And suddenly, we veer off into the land of creativity. Dice up one pear and throw it in there like it’s no big thing.

 

Ooh, and a handful of dried cranberries! That’ll be super tasty.

 

Back to basics for a second: 1 cup of Hellman’s mayonnaise. [As always, the brands that I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change recipes without warning. Always check your labels!]

 

Add 1 Tablespoon of lemon juice, also pretty standard in the chicken salad pantheon.

 

And one last unexpected hurrah, half a cup of Boar’s Head honey mustard. This one is on the sweeter side as far as honey mustards go, but feel free to experiment with one that’s more tangy. Just let the creative juices flow.

 

Stir everything together, and eat it straight out of the bowl! I mean, uh, refrigerate for later. Yeah.

 

Happy Eating!

 

Sweet Chicken Salad

2 chicken breasts, shredded
2 stalks celery
1 pear
1/4 cup dried cranberries
1 cup Hellman’s mayonnaise
1 TBS lemon juice
1/2 cup Boar’s Head honey mustard