My curry chicken salad

My curry chicken salad was based on a recipe from Cooking Light. It had a bunch of interesting stuff in it, like nuts, grapes, but I never had that stuff on hand. So, I just did a basic chicken salad and added curry powder to it. Not just any curry powder, but Penzey's hot curry powder. Curry can be a little wierd and overpowering, but the penzey's has a nice balance and the little bit of heat really adds something. So, here is my basic recipe:

~1 cup cooked chopped chicken
1 green onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1/3 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup plain yogurt
healthy pinch salt
a couple of shakes of Penzey's hot curry powder
- mix together and serve on sliced crossant

Green Bean and Sweet Red Pepper Salad

Ok, it's a bit hard to make these lettuce salads look different. I guess I could have worked on my presentation a bit. This one comes from the same book, Around the World in 450 Recipes. It was a nice, fresh tasting salad and I added a bit of the leftover crockpot chicken from the night before to make it a little more substantial. A couple of things I did, was to leave out the pickled serrano and I roasted and skinned my red peppers before adding them to the salad. Also, I was making salad for only two so I cut down on the amount of dressing but still used the proportionate amounts 3:1 oil to vinegar. Make sure you season it well with salt and pepper.

12 oz. cooked green beans
2 red bell peppers, seeded and chopped
2 spring onions, (white and green parts) chopped
1 or more drained pickled serrano chilies, well rinsed,seeded and chopped
1 iceberg lettuce, coarsely shredded
olives for garnish

For the dressing:
3 T. red wine vinegar
9 T. olive oil
salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste

Turkish Salad

Ok, I'm making a last ditch effort this week to try out a few more salads ... so stay tuned. This one comes from a cookbook I received as a gift over the holidays, Around the World in 450 Recipes. I threw some boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the crockpot and let them cook all day so we could have the salad with shredded chicken. It was an outstanding salad and very much like the Turkish Salads I would get in Berlin ... the baked chicken made it a little more substantial.

Turkish Salad
1 cos lettuce heart (butter lettuce)
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1/2 cucumber
4 tomatoes
1 red onion
8 oz. feta cheese, crumbled
black olives, to garnish

For the dressing:
3 T. olive oil
3 T. lemon juice
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 T. chopped fresh parsley
1 T. chopped fresh mint
salt and pepper, to taste

Really you don't need any instruction ... prep the salad veggies and wisk the dressing ingredients and toss. I bashed the garlic clove and let it just steep in the dressing for about 30 minutes and then removed it before tossing with the salad so it wouldn't be overpowered by garlic.

Spinach Salad with Spiced Pork and Ginger Dressing

I found this recipe in one of last year's Cooking Light. The pork turned out very well: tender, a little spicy, but not to hot. For the dressing, I just used leftover dressing from the crunchy romaine and added some ginger to it. I wish I had the salad vegtables that was in the original recipe, but I just used what I had on hand. I topped mine with with fried won tons.

Papa's salad

I love my dad. He is so random. I get 2 emails from my dad with all these pictures of salad. No explanation, nothing, just pictures. So, I have deduced that it is the Thai Lime Beef Salad originally posted by Robin here and he wanted to me to put it on the blog. So, here it is!

Honey Lime Fruit Toss

Here is a link to the recipe for a great fruit salad. I first found it on the back of the label on a can of mandarin oranges. It's easy to make and my girls LOVE fruit!

http://www.dole.com/Recipes/Recipes_Detail.jsp?ID=181

Side Note: I had a hard time with this one. We eat salads, but they're not usually anything to write home about. We open a bag of salad greens and add our favorite toppings. I do have a suggestion for a good store bought dressing: Golding Farms Honey Mustard.

Curried couscous salad

This recipe was from one of the healthy food episodes by Rachel Ray. This is a great salad. It has a little bit of everything and everything really goes together. I have made and brought it for potlucks and even though it is borderline wierd, most people seem to like it. I really though I had really put my take on it, but after reading the recipe this last time around, nope, pretty much straight from the book. I use a clementine instead of an orange. Picture below is the salad with tandori chicken:



Ok, having technical difficulties in finding the recipe...will update later.