Rosie Makes Chicken Salad With Pineapples And Almonds.

I liked this picture of my fork so I'm putting it in here.

Because it's my blog. And I can. So I did. So you enjoy. Mr. Hawthorne and I had split chicken breasts the other night. 99 cents a pound. There's no "cent" symbol on the keyboard. I know I could type everything in Microsoft Word and then get the character sets, and be able to put accents ague, accents grave, the cedillas, and all the other diacritical marks, but shoot, I want a cent key. But I digress. Mr. Hawthorne made the chicken dish from a recipe Mama Hawthorne used to make. She would wrap up a chicken bosom in foil with Lipton's Onion Soup Mix, pineapple slices and juice, and buttah. Quite a simple, tasty, hearty dish. But chicken needs to be cooked properly. And most times when I eat chicken or pork made by any one but myself, I find it overcooked and dry. I like my pork slightly on the pink side with juice and I like my chicken slightly over the pink side with juice.

Today I pulled Mr. Hawthorne's overcooked chicken off the bone and made something more palatable - in this case, a chicken salad.

I pulled the chicken apart and sprinkled maybe 2 teaspoons of sugar over top. (That's my first secret ingredient.)

My second secret ingredient - Tamari Sauce. (Soy Sauce version) About a tablespoon.

I minced one stalk of celery and one small pepper and sliced a green onion.

I sliced up the 2 cooked pineapple slices leftover in the baking dish, then decided I should use up the other 3 slices in the fridge. (Other 3 slices? - sorry no pictures, but they look amazingly like the cuts above, except yellower and fresher looking, if, that is, you can see freshness.)

Here are all the ingredients mixed in, with some salt and pepper, and one glop of mayo. And I ended up using one more smaller sized glop.

Next, I toasted a handful of whole almonds and tossed them in. Normally, I would use toasted sliced almonds, but Youngest Hawthorne is here and he probably wouldn't like nuts so I left 'em big so he could pick 'em out. If you use the sliced almonds, instead of pineapple, I think nice, seedless, red grapes would be quite good. And if you like curry powder, you might want to save a cup maybe of this basic chicken salad and add a bit of curry, to taste. And you have two very good, very different, very basic, very nice, very delightful chicken salads.

Here's a scoop of my pineapple/almond chicken salad. You can see 2 whole almonds, some pepper, a bit of celery (or is that green pepper?), and a piece of pineapple in the back.

Excellent chicken salad. Chicken salads are like potato salads, chilis, coleslaws, and BBQs. EVERYBODY has a recipe for them. And most are all pretty darn good. But I think we all have our favorites and the next link for potato salad is a favorite of mine. If you click HERE and scroll down far enough, you'll first see Mr. Hawthorne's potato salad, then you'll see my favorite lemon/Dijon/dill potato salad which is a wonderful recipe I got from my dear friend, Maxine. You really should try Maxine's potato salad. It's da bombe!