Chicken Salad with Tart Honey Dressing
I am often wildly ambitious when I buy lettuce. When I’m looking at it, deciding whether or not to put it in my cart, I’m a person who is convinced she will eat it with every meal. A person who listens to every nutritionist ever quoted in a woman’s magazine and dutifully fills half her plate with salad before even looking at the pasta. Who then goes on to eat it with a rapturous look of fulfillment and joy, sunlight glancing off my shiny hair and clear skin as I laugh and feel sorry for people who don’t eat salads.
Into the cart goes the lettuce. Up go my expectations and later that week out go the bins, full of sludgy green waste that, deep down, I knew I wasn’t going to eat. Not even that deep down. Like, right there. Right under the surface I had no intention of eating all of it.
Lettuces aren’t my go to food source. I have nothing against them, I just find them awkward to eat. There is no way to eat a salad without leaves hanging out of your mouth at some point. Only rabbits looks cute with lettuce falling out of their faces. But I do understand there’s a lot of micro nutritional benefit to eating a variety of plants so I’ve been challenging myself to figure out how to make myself do it.
The first thing I’ve learned is that there has to be enough non-herbaceous elements to require a knife as well as a fork. The more I can make a chopped salad of it, the happier I am. If there’s also an interesting dressing to put on it, I’m listening. A legitimate use for croutons? Now we’re talking.
This concoction is helpful because it also uses up a lot of other things you may be left with in small amounts like basil and pine nuts and sundried tomatoes. No? Just me? Come on. No one ever needs a whole bag of pine nuts at one time. If you have used up all of your pine nuts, you can substitute walnuts instead.
