Grilled Chicken Salad

Simple meals are my favorite. I’m not a fan of meals that take forever to prep and cleanup. While I do make a meal every now and that has a lot of steps, almost all of the food that we eat in our home is simple and healthy, made out of basic ingredients. Sometimes my wife or I will get an itch to go more complicated than that, but it’s uncommon.

Salads can be quite easy to make - you can buy pre-made salad kits at the store, pre-cut lettuce, or just buy all of the raw ingredients you want. While cutting all of your own ingredients isn’t that difficult, sometimes pre-cut salad is so much easier to just dump in a bowl and go with.

Similarly, grilled chicken is quite easy to make. Turn your grill on, place the chicken on the grill, and add some basic seasoning on top. Flip it over after a few minutes, and it’s ready to go. I recommend grilling your chicken pretty plain, as it’s much easier to add things like barbecue sauce later rather than trying to scrape it off. By grilling chicken plain, it becomes much easier to use in other recipes.

When you do grill your chicken, make enough for more than just one meal. Grilled chicken can be used for so many different meals, and can really make delicious meals. By grilling it plain, you’ll open up a pretty wide range of recipe options in addition to eating it plain.

For adding grilled chicken to salad, I’d recommend that you let the chicken cool down. In fact, this is one of those recipes that I prefer to make the day after the chicken was actually cooked. Cold chicken goes really well with a salad. Simply cut the chicken into a few strips, and place it on top of the salad. You can put as much chicken as you want on your salad - unlike at a restaurant where they’ll bring you a salad with hardly any chicken on it. Your homemade chicken salad can have far more meat to it.

In terms of dressing, there are a few options. First off, dressing has a lot of calories in it, so if you’re trying to watch your calorie count, make sure you know how much you can have. My favorite way to eat a grilled chicken salad is with ranch dressing and a little bit of barbecue sauce. Just put them both on top as dressing, and then mix it all together. However, just ranch, or your other favorite dressing are also excellent choices.

Overall, this recipe is very easy to make - grilling your chicken is the most time consuming piece, but if you’re making multiple pieces of grilled chicken for use later in the week, then the time becomes negligible.

This recipe is also great for kids. Teaching your kids to love salad is a great way to get them to eat vegetables. If they’ll also eat the chicken on top of the salad, then your kids have found something healthy that they actually enjoy.

Upgrade your next salad with a bit of chicken. No reason to eat plain salad everyday. Mix it up a little by adding some grilled chicken to the top of salad.