Thanksgiving this year was odd in all regards. I made chicken breasts earlier in the week, and ate a couple “Thanksgiving-like” meals with cranberry sauce (my favorite after dressing!), green beans with french fried onions (not a casserole – just sprinkled on top of plain green beans, which was tasty enough!), dressing (lots, since I like this best of all for the herbs used in it), pureed sweet potatoes (simply made with salt, pepper, butter but not the peanut butter I usually like to put in sweet potatoes), and acorn squash (also a favorite that I prepared simply with just salt, pepper, and butter).
I didn’t fix potatoes or dessert, mostly because I had too much of everything else. I don’t like to make so much food I’m eating on the same foods after two days. Nor do I freeze leftovers because I’ve found all that does is preserve them till I toss them out months later…! Fixing meals for one requires a bit of waste if one isn’t careful! The breasts came three (large!) breasts to a package, so I had one left headed into the last day I’d eat one as a leftover.
After two meals of pre-Thanksgiving chicken, I was ready for something different that I could have for lunch, maybe even supper if I didn’t get through it at noon. Chicken salad seemed my best bet for something simple that I could combine with ingredients on hand yet not make so much I ended up wasting part of it.
So, here’s what I put in my chicken salad: cubed chicken breast, cinnamon applesauce (about 1/4 cup), crumbled pecans (lots – I break them up in my hands), fine-shredded carrot (about one medium carrot, mostly for color), cranberry raisins (a nod to the season, and to add texture and a little tartness), powdered ginger (because it adds a little zing to food and I love the combination of chicken and ginger), mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. I don’t use recipes for the most part. When I do I usually add or modify the recipe “to taste”!
Fortunately, I thought the salad tasted just fine, surprise, surprise! I ate it with crackers and mashed potatoes. (What?!) Yeah, it was a strange meal. I had cranberry juice mixed half and half with diet Seven-Up, a further strangeness that somehow worked: This was not your standard Thanksgiving!
Your chicken salad sound good to me and our diet went down the toilet today as we are having pizza.
I am not a big dinner cook on holidays anymore as it usually ends up in the belly of the dumpster.
All my family lives too far away to show up for a meal. For that matter, they have their kids and grandkids together for Thanksgiving, so there you go! I haven’t decided yet whether I’m fixing something with hamburger, cabbage, onion, peas (maybe), and rice or popping a pot pie into the oven. I did the pizza a couple weeks ago, and ended up having three meals on it before I decided I’d had enough. I ended up tossing two slices, something like heresy!
Everyone’s chicken salad is a mix of what works for them and I’ve never known anyone to really enjoy someone ELSE’s recipe – yours sounds pretty interesting (pecans AND carrots?!?!) Hope you and the boys felt some holiday spirit for Thanksgiving even if you did without the turkey!
Ordinarily, I’d use Miraclewhip instead of mayonnaise, sweet pickles instead of applesauce and carrots, walnuts instead of pecans, celery for crunch (none in the house…!), apples instead of the cranberry raisins. I use shredded carrots in potato salad, too, another salad that never has the same ingredients in my kitchen! I occasionally produce a flop, but nothing a little touchup won’t fix. Ground ginger ends up in my potato salad, too. Regular pickles are something I used to use a lot until I was put on Cytoxan and Prednisone when I came down with Wegener’s granulomatosis. Those drugs (or one or the other- I don’t know which) affect the sense of taste, making foods made with vinegar, for example, puke-worthy. I can eat these foods again, but there’s always that little nag at the back of my brain that says, “It might still taste terrible!”