Random Recipe: Buffalo Chicken Salads

You know those days you can’t be buggered to cook anything?  It’s hot, standing over the stove sounds like the 7th circle of hell, and anything involving more than 10 minutes of prep isn’t gonna fly.  This is the perfect night for the buffalo chicken salad.

“But Quix”, you whine, “salads are so booooring.  And I’m huuuuuungry.  I want something filling.  Who just eats a salad for dinner?”  Have a little faith and give this one a try.  I guarantee the fiber and protien encased within the bowl will do you right.  First, get a bowl that looks more like it would serve a family size popcorn, or perhaps dish up potato salad at your next picnic.  This is your personal salad bowl.

Something like this.  However, do not actually attempt to ingest the bowl.  It does not end well.  However, this should give you a good idea of the size of the bowl.  Larger than your head is a good start.

The chicken part is up to you.  If you’re feeling splurgy, you can use some breaded chicken fingers or a chicken patty (nuke them for 1 minute, crisp them up in a pan, douse them in Frank’s Red Hot, and then chop up).  If you had already had a mexican fiesta earlier that day like moi, then you’re going for grilled chicken.  It can be pre-cooked or leftover or whatever, but what we did (and it was delicious) was thawed chicken breasts, pounded them out with a mallet nice and flat, marinated the chi-boob-lies (the slightly vulgar term we came up with for chicken breasts) in a mess of Frank’s, and then grilled them on good ol’ George Forman.  Not the man, but the grill.  The most important part to make it a BUFFALO chicken salad is it needs to be good and dripping in hot sauce.

Then, to the salad part.  The ingredients we had worked well, but it was mostly a matter of playing “what’s in the vegetable drawer?”.  Just be careful shredding baby carrots or you’ll get an owwie.

It looks much worse today, I promise.   To those of you who actually eat at my house, I will say I found it and removed it from the food.  To the rest of you I will admit that I’m not sure where the skin went but… more protien I say!  Anyhoo, the particular concoction I came up with was:

About half a head of romaine lettuce

A quarter of a gigantic cucumber

Half a roma tomato

Enough onion to look like a lot but not *too* much

Half a small green pepper

6 shredded baby carrots

A stalk and a half of celery

A bunch of snap peas that got sacrificed as a “pre-dinner snack” and never made it into the bowl.

About 1/3 of a small can of black olives

A couple pinches of blue cheese crumbles

A nice sprinkling of bacon bits

We topped the salads with a small chicken breast each, and proceeded to drizzle with light ranch.  Now, this is up to you, but fat free ranch makes my tongue start to riot, full fat ranch makes my jeans start to pop, light is a compromise – get it in the refrigerator section if you can.  I think they are superior to the Krafts and store brands for creamy dressings.  Also, because we are affecionados of anything spicy, more Frank’s went on top.

This was Zliten’s as he is as they say a “hater” and cannot stomach cucumbers and tomatoes.

Here is mine in all it’s glory, seconds before it took the express train to mah belly.  The awesome thing with this is I think it clocked in at 400 calories and was suuuuuper filling.  You can also easily add more veggies of your choosing, and make it even more grandiose and awesome.  You can of course remove such things as the olives, bacon, blue cheese, and change out the dressing to make it ridiculously lo-cal, but seriously, it’s a different salad then.  A little bit of the indulgent stuff is what makes this a meal and not a “ok, what next to devour in the pantry” snack.  If you’re not feeling the salad, you can roll this up into a wrap just as easy, which we like just fine as well.