As you can tell, the last couple weeks have been nuts. My cooking sadly has taken the toll of that business too. This week though chicken was on sale so I decided to buy some after not buying it for like a month and a half. I was trying to finish all the other foods that I had bought previously before I bought anything else and the time had finally come. I bought chicken tenders because they are much easier to cook and they are better for portion sizes. Since I bought chicken tenders, I immediately thought salad but not just any salad. I wanted to make one of my all-time favorite salads...barbeque chicken salad. My inspriation for this salad comes from my favorite place to eat...Panera Bread. For some reason I love Panera Bread and could literally eat every meal there. You can ask my friends, if we're going out to eat Panera is always my first choice. If you've never eaten there, you have to because it is o so good! I love basically anything on the menu but my favorite salad to get there is the BBQ Chopped Chicken Salad. This salad that I made is a spin off of it. Here is what went into my BBQ chicken salad...
Marinade for chicken (this is all estimated because I didn't measure them accurately):
1/4 cup bbq sauce
1/8 cup honey mustard
1/2 tsp garlic powder
Salad:
4 chicken tenders
1 1/2 cups Romaine lettuce
1/4 cup roasted southwest style corn, drained and rinsed
10 baby tomatoes, chopped
1/4 cucumber, chopped
1 Roma tomato, chopped
1/4 green bell pepper, chopped
1 packet light ranch dressing
Ground pepper to taste
First thing I did to re-create my salad was mix the marinade together. I wanted to make a more honey bbq sauce so I decided to mix in the honey mustard with it. I love garlic in anything so I added that too. I then placed the chicken tenders in a plastic bag and poured the bbq sauce in the bag. I let them marinade for about an hour. After they marinated for an hour, I put them in an oven at 375 degrees for about 14 minutes. This was the perfect amount of time for cooking.
Bbq sauce
While the chicken was cooking, I began to make my salad and roast the corn. I had never tried this corn before but it sounded really good and the Panera salad has a corn blend in it but it is roasted. I wanted my corn to be roasted too but I didn't know how to go about doing it. So I decided to do a little trial and error. I heated up a skillet pan to medium high heat and sprayed it with cooking oil. I then added the corn to the pan and stirred it around for about 15 minutes and it worked! It was perfectly roasted so I will definitely roast corn like this again.
Love me some bbq chicken
It worked, it worked!
While the corn was roasting too, I chopped the lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, and green pepper and added them all to a salad bowl. Once the chicken was done, I took it out of the oven and cut into it to make sure it was done. Once I knew the chicken was fully cooked, I chopped it up and added it to the salad. Once all the ingredients were in the bowl, I added the pepper and the ranch dressing and mixed it all together. It was awesome! It definitely hit the spot for my craving and I will definitely be making this again. Next time I may try to add some tortilla strips to add a little more crunch but we'll see. So if you like bbq chicken and you like salads, make this!
Finished product...almost as good as the real thing
