Now I don’t actually solicit feedback from people who try out my recipes. Nor do I, for that matter, listen to any of them that rudely barge into my kitchen complaining about poor quality, excessive paprika, or food poisoning. That being said, I understand that much criticism has been levied at me. Without reading any of it, I’m going to assume that it’s all about how hard it is to make my recipes. They’re too complicated, I imagine you say. They use ingredients that you can’t seriously expect us to have on hand, I further envision you wailing childishly. And they take so idiotically goddamn long, I believe you to cry. I would like to address these criticisms in turn. But honestly I don’t think that you will listen, so let me just point out that an inability to wait for a reward—in this case the most scrumptious of food—is a characteristic frequent in the most newly-birthed of children.
Anyway, if any of you insolent, disagreeable, argumentative complainers are still reading—presumably for your weird and creepy masochistic fetish—here is a dish that is so trivial to make, using such basic ingredients as canned goods and bread, that even you can find no offense. So here we go: the surprisingly delicious and really easy lunch that is the chicken salad sandwich.
Chicken salad, and its multitude of variants like ham salad, tuna salad, oyster salad, beef salad, and buffalo salad, is a foodstuff consisting primarily of the titular protein. It is nothing like anything else I have ever heard called a salad. It looks nothing like a salad (unless your salads are pink), shares almost no preparation steps with a salad (unless you chop your lettuce by brutally stabbing it with a fork), and contains completely different ingredients (unless you tend to forgo the lettuce and croutons for extra bacon on your caesar salad).
Start with a serving of canned chicken. If you’re curious, a can contains two servings, presumably for caloric on-the-nutrition-label reasons. Use a fork or spoon (I recommend fork) to ladle or scoop mayonnaise into the bowl which you already put the canned chicken. Now use your fork to mush the two together until you get a consistent mixture without any chunks. (If you were reading while you followed along and took my note about the fork as facetious, congratulations! Now you get to choose between spending three times as long mushing with your spoon or getting an extra utensil dirty.)
At this point most people would be done. Maybe a dash of pepper, maybe not. Then they smear their concoction on a slice of bead and call it a sandwich. If you feel like canned chicken is a rather tasteless meal, devoid of adventure and enjoyment, it’s not the chicken; it’s the people making it. So let’s spice it up.
What you add to your chicken salad isn’t important. What matters is that you add something. Mustard is a good start, as is barbecue sauce. Another favourite of mine is olives, closely followed by banana peppers. This, even more so than my other dishes, is a real opportunity to make it yours. Raid your cupboard, see what interesting things you can find. Really go nuts with it.
And when you then apply your tasty mush to the bread, don’t unceremoniously slop it on. Put it on a pre-toasted bun with cheese, lettuce, and a pickle spear. Keep it classy. Or even go beyond the humble (but unquestionably delicious) sandwich. Try spreading it on a flour tortilla, layering with cheese, and making a melt. If you’re bulking and don’t want to fill precious stomach space with carbs rather than protein, forgo the bread altogether and make it into a high-viscosity, low-liquid soup. The possibilities are as endless as the number of ways to source canned chicken from a poultry carcass.
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