<![CDATA[Really simple recipes: chipotle chicken salad]]>I often by prepared chicken salad at Whole Foods. The taste and quality are pretty reasonable, and the cost is not horrible compared to the effort required to actually make it myself (cooking chicken breast, chopping vegetables, etc.). But although their chicken salad is reasonably well seasoned (some customers probably think it’s too salty, in fact), I often find myself wanting something a bit spicier. From time to time they sell a “spicy” or “buffalo” chicken salad in the prepared foods department, but it always costs significantly more than the plain chicken salad, and I’m not going to pay $1 extra for the privilege of having someone else mix hot sauce into my chicken salad, just out of general cussedness if for no other reason.

At least in my region, the chicken salad is available in the prepack case as 14-ounce tubs:
Container of chicken salad

I happened to have three fourths of a can of chipotles en adobo left over from another recipe, which I had frozen.
Some chipotles en adobo (previously frozen)

I love the smoky taste of chipotles and adobo sauce, so I figured this would be an ideal way to spice up the chicken salad. So I minced two whole chipotles (not hard to do after they’ve been canned and even easier after a freeze-thaw cycle) and added them to the chicken salad along with two tablespoons of the adobo sauce. Mix thoroughly, and the result is a perfectly serviceable chipotle chicken salad:
Chipotle chicken salad

It even fits back into the original packaging:
Hey, it fits back in the same container!

No nutrition data for this one; the chipotles and adobo sauce don’t make a significant nutritional contribution to the final product, so just use the data for the original chicken salad in whatever your preferred serving is. (Normally I’d put it on an Iggy’s Bread of the World pepper brioche hamburger bun, but this time since I have so much of Joanne Chang’s plain brioche loaf, I’ll toast up a couple slices of that instead.)

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