I’ve always made chicken salad, more or less, the same way. Sometimes with pecans, sometimes with toasted almonds. Then I might add some chopped apple or sliced grapes. One thing that remains the same is the celery and mayonnaise along with the chicken.
(READ MORE: Keeping the mayo and the comfort in an updated chicken salad)
Like I said, this is the way I’ve always made it, but lately, I realized it was getting rather boring. That’s when I ran into a recipe for curried chicken salad with cashews, raisins, honey, yogurt, more honey, lemon juice, curry powder and a couple of other seasonings.
The recipe intrigued me, but my immediate thought was honey yogurt plus more honey would make it an awfully sweet chicken salad, which did not sound appealing at all, even though the lemon juice would help cut the sweetness to some degree.
But I was interested enough to change out some of the ingredients in my chicken salad. So instead of honey yogurt, I used regular yogurt and added a little honey, just to taste, a teaspoonful at a time. I didn’t have any raisins so I use chopped dates, and it was nearly perfect. The only thing I didn’t have was lemon juice, so I put it on hold until I did. Once I came home with a lemon, juiced it and added it to the chicken salad, it went from almost perfect to delicious — a very nice change of pace from traditional chicken salad.