Category: salad

Lean Cuisine Salad Additions Asian-Style Chicken

This week on Chopped: Pre-Spring Break Edition, or as we call it behind the scenes, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, What am I supposed to do with all of this hummus?” we encounter a plethora of ingredients our intrepid chef has never reached for before, much less made the effort to consume, including, but not limited to granola-infused peanut butter, a sack of clementines atop a bookshelf that came off as clever and hip, but quickly rotted, a haircut inspired by Marlon Brando and a Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio, and aging Lean Cuisine Salad Additions.

Spoiler alert, also, real talk: do I look like the type to eat salads? Absolutely none of the current stereotypes I cuddle up to would eat a salad, I know this because I’ve tried and failed. So, Lean Cuisine, that, and my apathy about buying vegetables in quantities not befitting a single, dour human being compels me to try your new kits with spaghetti. Store-brand spaghetti, that chicken is too pallid for the fresh stuff. That, and the fact that it took about 15 minutes before I realized that filling my Firefox tabs with recipes and looking at them would not suffice my actual bodily hunger. Tant pis.

I’m not including a recipe because it’s a little reprehensible, but suffice to say, it includes peanut butter, a ginger-sesame dressing out of a salad kit, copious amounts of hot sauce, and closed doors. However, I also realize none of you read this blog for moral culpability, so I’m inclined to also tell you solely because it doesn’t entirely matter. This salad kit is delicious when it isn’t used for salad. My favorite part? The pineapple and yellow carrot pieces. While I may not have prepared this correctly- I don’t own a microwave and don’t care to go to the convenience store to ape theirs five blocks away, so I thawed the chicken and veggies instead for a few hours, that may have been what improved them. Sticking them in the microwave, according to conspiracy theorists and eco-minimalists, leeches all of the flavor out of them and renders them mushy and unpalatable. Here, they retained a little snap and remained firm and bright. Paired with chow mein noodles tossed in sriracha (noodle-on-noodle action) it was a great dinner, and two more great lunches.

Also, holy chicken, Batman. Either corporations are getting hella deft at mimicking food (a quick glance to the ingredients reveals this to be slightly true, modified tapioca starch) or they’re just using better chicken. This tastes, feels, and for all intensive purposes, is real and quite tasty. And better than buying and/or thawing large chicken breasts. So, Lean Cuisine, my lassitude is your gain. Four for you, Glen Coco.

Avocado Week: Salad

Shrimp taco salad is so easy to prepare and so hard to fuck up. This was a particularly zesty recipe, with lime zested beans, chili-garlic rice, guacamole, paprika sour cream, and plenty of shrimp and salsa verde on top. Good Mexican food is so damned filling and so cheap. It might be one of the most satisfying cuisines I can cook.

We ate this salad after a day of running errands and it was honestly as good as any I’ve had in a restaurant. Fairly simple, too, with a layer of lime black beans, chili garlic rice, guacamole, paprika sour cream, and salsa verde marinated grilled shrimp with plenty of salsa slathered on top. It was only until later when I realized that not only had I forgotten the cheese, but that we didn’t even need it in the first place.It’s a recipe that orchestrates itself easily if you tackle the time-consuming elements, like the rice and beans, first and then prepare the cold toppings while those are cooking.In conclusion, here is our cat. She tried to jump on her cat tower while a potted plant was resting on top, miscalculated the distance, and got wedged in between the window and the cube because of her exceptionally rubenesque rear end. We laughed and took photos and posted them to PETA’s Myspace and then we let her down. All was well and she ate shrimp off the counter.

Wendy’s Berry Almond Chicken Salad

Last night, Swagger, FF, and I took a jaunt in the jalopy so I could bribe them into eating some of the fast food world’s newest offerings. I ended up eating this one myself, the new Berry Almond Chicken Salad from Wendy’s along with their new Wild Berry Tea. The press release came in a scant three hours before I tried the salad, and boasted a plethora of things I love, including an exhaustive array of one specific component of the salad. Or so I thought. What with the recent mayonnaise-based chicken salad popularity in the Subway and Arby’s markets, I expected a similar coup from their female counterpart with the advertising focused on the trendy acai and fruit additions, but it turned out to look like most of the salads on the commercial market today.

All of the components of this salad were represented differently than how I’d expected them to be. With an absurd $6.99 price tag, I inwardly groaned. Not because I’d also just bought Swagger twenty five spicy chicken nuggets, but because I’d never willingly spent so much on a vegetable based salad before. From the get-go, the salad distinctly separates itself into two categories: ingredients that work well together, and ingredients that just fall short.
This being the first day of the salad’s nationwide debut, I was disappointed, but not surprised, that my local Wendy’s employees got the chicken wrong. Instead of the grilled chicken, one of the spicy chicken fillets was diced up in the salad. Oddly enough, this combination worked. With the nutty creaminess from the parmesan, the chicken’s spice was toned down and I found myself enjoying the different play of textures within each bite. The salad appears to give you your money’s worth in the parmesan department. The entire upper third of my bowl was filled with curly parmesan slices. The berries, though obviously fresh and juicy, came few and far between with each bite. The blueberries erred toward the anemic side and ended up uselessly rolling into the nether regions of the bowl, but the strawberries were the real star of the show, providing less flavor than the more powerful proteins, but a sweetness that balanced the dish out. The lettuce, some pieces clearly leftover from crappy iceberg salads and others, leafy and earthy, brought it all together with an interesting textural distinction and vaguely healthy air.
Honestly, if the salad had just stopped at chicken, cheese, berries, and a little arugula on top, I’d have been happy right there. With the addition of more textural elements, like the raspberry-acai vinaigrette and the toasted almonds, the salad took an irritating spin toward the overloaded. Both the nuts and the sauce completely disappeared behind the wakes of the more powerful flavors. The sauce left a wet, acidic aftertaste behind and the nuts acted as though they weren’t there at all. It bothered me that elements that definitely bumped the price and calorie level of the salad played no integral role in improving the flavor.
Overall, I was pleased that Wendy’s, in attempting to go beyond the traditional constraints of limp, over-dressed fast food vegetal fare, provided a good prototype for its imitators, but could not find enough to enjoy about this salad that justified its price tag and uniqueness. In a fast food market, this is an anomaly, but for home cooks, Wendy’s isn’t reinventing the wheel.