We make several kinds of chicken salad, not minced enough to put in a sandwich but a bit chunky to be a main dish. This is a simple salad, not many ingredients and quickly made, assuming that you have cold chicken on hand, which I often do. The recipe is slightly adapted from an old cookbook called Greene on Greens, which, as you'd expect, is all about vegetables. This recipe is from the fennel chapter.
The ingredients:2 cups or so chopped chicken;1 cup chopped fennel bulb;1/4 cup finely chopped red onion;1/3 cup mayo;1 teaspoon dijon mustard;a splash of white wine (not shown); salt and pepper to taste; andsome fennel fronds to garnish.
I cut the tops and bottoms off the fennel bulbs, then I split them lengthwise, cut each half into lengthwise slices and chopped the sections into small pieces.
I chopped some red onion into finer pieces and put both sets of vegetables into the eventual serving bowl. Next, I skinned and deboned the cold chicken and cut it into pieces that were a little bigger than the fennel pieces. I added that to the bowl.
Off camera, I put the mayo and mustard into a little bowl and mixed them up. The recipe wanted me to use 1 cup mayo. Way too much, I thought. The recipe also wanted me to use about 2 tablespoons of pernod, an anise-flavored liqueur. I don't have pernod. Instead, splashed in a little white wine to thin the mixture and scraped the dressing onto the salad. I mixed and tasted and added a bit of salt and pepper and it was ready.
I had cut most of the tops off the fennel earlier in the week. Crowded refrigerator. So I did not have as much fennel frond left as I would have liked. I sprinkled what I had.
We had the chicken salad with tomato-cucumber-red onion-feta-kalamata olive salad and cantelope. It was a nice light supper on a hot day. No need for the oven!
Fennel is not a regular in my refrigerator, but I need to remember it. Sometimes it is roasted with root vegetables to accompany baked chicken or pork. But it's also good raw in a salad, crunchy like celery with a faintly licorice flavor. Leftover chicken salad is always good for lunch. This chicken salad is no exception.
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