Mayoless Chicken Salad

02/28/17 252.4 lbs

 HAPPY MARDI GRAS, MAIS AMI!

For size of container. Hand is 7 inches long.

Not the whole of container. This is what survived a pot luck.

There's a lot of calories in a tablespoon full of mayo. And when I make a egg baded salad, I can easily use up to half a jar of the stuff--or even more. So, I had to find a filler sauce that wasn't plain water.  In the past, I increased the mustard level, which made it only fit for the spouse.  (He will put mustard on anything.) And they STILL have a ton of mayo in them. This is no healthy snack item.

I had bought a biiig rectangular tray of boneless chicken thighs (around 4-5 lbs) on sale, and threw it in the crockpot over a busy weekend, unseasoned. The roommate bought a dozen and a half eggs and never got around to eating them, so they needed to be cooked.  Now, this is the basis for chicken salad: bland, boiled to death food that needs to go, and quick. Yay for chicken salad.

But what to use for the glue that holds this junk together?  Especially when you are trying to gwt your act together? This time I chose cottage cheese, around 1/5 the calories of mayo.



Most people hate the taste of cottage cheese. The trick with it is to put it in things that override the taste--for all that it is hated , it is extremely mild. Eggs alone are strong enough to mute the flavor. But again, bland. This Couillon wants something that has at leaat a little flavor.

So, enters in the green olives (local Italian tradition), 20ish, diced.
1 Ranch seasoning packet
2 tablespoons soy aminos
3ish oz yellow mustard
1 skillet seared diced onion (non-stick pan, no butter needed)

All into the:
4-5lbs of chicken, boiled, strained, shreaded
18 boiled eggs, diced
1.5 lbs container of cottage cheese (good the way it is...erm, well, open the container)

This is the point where it starts to taste like a normal chicken salad. Pretty sedate, but not so bland that it was a failure. Add a tablespoon or two of Sirracha sauce if you need a kick.

I arbitrarily chose to call it 12 servings...which is right around 500 calories, but that is a lot of chicken salad.

This made it through people eating the heck out of it, and not even going through but maybe half?  That's a pretty big bowl.

The consistency is closer to subway's tuna salad than to my normally veggie heavy chicken salad. Which means that you could stretch it further by doubling the onions and adding celery.

The onion was sauted because if you put it in, raw, it both dominates the salad (which gets worse with time) and causes it to seperate with a liquid runoff (which also gets worse with time). Knocking out the strength and liquid of the onion is done when it is half cooked.

But the good thing is that all.you have to do, for your regularly prepared chicken salad, is substitute the mayo for cottage cheese. Thia stuff ia versatile.

Let's eat!