A recipe for chicken, not tuna, salad
There's no way to make this look good but it was good.
I’ve been thinking about chicken salad lately, because apparently canned tuna is “not that good for you” (quoting no doctor here, just some regular dummies around me).1 And did you know that light tuna is actually a different fish from regular tuna?! As I said this week elsewhere, this is my Chicken of the Sea moment). Yes tuna is fish which we love but it’s also high in mercury, you’re probably eating it with mayonnaise, etc etc, blah blah blah.
I, like many of you, grew up eating plenty of tuna sandwiches, and in adulthood have pivoted to just eating it out of the bowl, sans bread, a real “who needs anything else?” moment. What we did not eat a lot of: chicken salad, which is, according to Jessica Simpson, basically the same thing.
So in an effort to try something new, while making another great recipe from Ali Slagle’s cookbook the other night, I cooked some extra chicken and set it aside—planning ahead with leftovers!—with the intention of making the chicken salad recipe in the cookbook. This recipe is another that suggests the use of leftover chicken from THE Favorite Chicken (no, we haven’t gotten there yet; I’m holding out the good stuff with the hope you will continue reading, if you haven’t yet figured that out), which is probably part of why I hadn’t attempted it before—I rarely plan like that. I’ve written about chicken and tarragon before, so go there for my thoughts on the herb, but its specific flavor was probably also part of the reason I wasn’t clamoring for this.
Though the Ali Slagle recipe—Green Rice with Singed Feta—called for bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, my go-to as well, the store closest to our house only had boneless, skinless thighs. Had I been planning to use this chicken only for chicken salad, I probably actually would have been tempted to use white meat; it shreds much more easily and just screams chicken salad. But here we are: it’s the next day, it’s lunch time, I am not having tuna but I am getting my protein and having chicken.
As long time readers might predict, I of course skipped the peppers; immediate revulsion. I also wanted this to be more herbaceous than just tarragon would have provided, so I added some the parsley and dill leftover from the previous night’s meal. I ignored suggestion to add hardboiled eggs; my dad really seemed to—classic midwesterner—love to do that. I did not chill the salad because I needed to eat, but I’m sure that would have been lovely.
Also note the lack of measurements; I used two chicken thighs, probably more herbs than called for, and maybe a tablespoon or two of mayo. The salad, served with some whole wheat Wheat Thins, fed two adults for lunch. It didn’t quite scratch the tuna salad craving, but it got close. Plus, it felt very Helen Gurley Brown, going to “the club” with my Nana—all in a fun, not depressing 1950s way, of course.
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Also because Bethenny Frankel keeps posting about it on her horrific, can’t-look-away, TikToks. Not linking to spare you!