BYOL: Curried Chicken Salad

Today is a big day. It's the day that I pass my curried chicken salad recipe on to you.

Curried chicken salad has a special place in my heart because it was one of four foods that I made on loop from August 2006 to the spring of 2008. At the time I was making $24,000 -- per annum -- as an editorial assistant at a magazine. In order to live in Manhattan on that budget I had to impose WWII style rationing, alotting an average of just $10 a day for food and drink. New Yorkers can spend more than that each day on coffee alone. To meet my budget, soda, gum, desserts, storebought coffee, and bottled water were eliminated as needless extravagances; snacks were considered a special treat; dinner date invitations were accepted as a matter of principle. A girl needs to eat, as the saying goes. Indeed.

Most of my breakfasts, lunches, and dinners during that time were cooked from scratch. Aside from curried chicken salad, the other three foods I made consistently during this period were this dish (or variations thereof), pastel omelets, and a recipe that I have dubbed Poverty Chili. The Viking happens to love Poverty Chili, much in the same way that Marie Antoinette loved her Norman Hamlet.

I look back on this (admittedly, deeply bourgeois) flirtation-with-poverty period of life with particular fondness, choosing to celebrate my own plucky self-reliance and conveniently forget about the wide, soft safety net laid by parents who would never have let anything truly nasty happen to their only daughter.

In my memories, I was a Dickensian heroine in fingerless gloves, rifling through trash bins and peering from the cold into warm, glowing shop windows. I specifically remember walking by Pierre Marcolini Chocolates on Park Avenue one January day and having an immense, otherworldy, primeval craving for one of the $7 hot chocolates that they serve there. After some mental anguish I finally allowed myself to buy a cup, and still remember sipping it, warm, thick, and silky, as I made my way down 57th street in a state of elation.

Now that I have virtually free reign with the food and wine budget, sensory experiences on this level rarely happen for me. When they do, they tend to involve a lot more than a $7 hot chocolate. That's truly a shame, and ought to serve as a lesson about the value of a little deprivation.

Back to the curried chicken salad. When I was in college I frequently bought the dish from a cafe called Atticus, which is where I got the idea to make it for myself in the first place. Not only did I love the taste of it, but it embodied the Holy Trinity of poverty foods: cheap, healthy, and quick to prepare.



What makes this curried chicken salad recipe so special, you may ask? Okay, it's not exactly the formula for Coke, but I did play around with a lot of different curried chicken salad recipes before I came up with what I deem to be the perfect version. It's based off a recipe that I originally found in a 2002 issue of Gourmet.

Curried chicken salads tend to have fruit and/or nuts in them, most frequently grapes and walnuts. I immensely dislike mixing fruit with meat (besides apples with pork), plus grapes and walnuts are expensive, so they were eliminated right off the bat.



However, you'll need to keep a sweet element in the dressing to counterbalance the earthy, musky flavor of the curry powder. I love Cross & Blackwell's Major Grey's Chutney for this (partly for the way it tastes, mostly for the winsome association with English Colonialism), but you can substitute 1 teaspoon of honey if that's what you have on hand. The touch of sweetness brings an otherwise flat dressing to life.

Then there's the nutrition factor. I substitute fat free Greek yogurt (in all its improbable thickness and creaminess) and low fat mayonnaise in the place of full-fat mayo. I use only white meat chicken. Even the curry powder itself has health credentials -- curry is a spice combination made from turmeric, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, etc, many of which are known to boost immunity, decrease inflammation, and soothe the digestive system.



As for the recipe's ease and simplicity, that mainly comes down to how the chicken is prepared. Listen, simmering boneless, skinless chicken breasts in broth and water is not something they're going to teach you to do at the Cordon Bleu. I'm not going to vouch for the culinary merits, but I can tell you that it's a fuss-free way to cut out all the unpleasantness of a hot oven, dirty dishes, and having to trim and debone a chicken carcass.

Curried Chicken Salad
Adapted From Gourmet Magazine

Serves 5

2 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 lb skinless boneless chicken breast
1/2 c. light mayonnaise
1/3 c. Greek yogurt
5 teaspoons curry powder
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 -2 Tablespoons Major Gray's Chutney (to taste)
1 medium red onion, finely chopped
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
5 whole wheat pitas
Romaine lettuce (optional

1. Bring chicken broth and 4 cups water to a simmer.
2. Add chicken and simmer, uncovered, 6 minutes. Remove pan from heat and cover, then let stand until chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes. Transfer chicken to a plate, cool and chop into 1/2-inch pieces.
3. Whisk together mayonnaise, yogurt, curry, lime juice, chutney, salt, and pepper in a large bowl.
4. Add chicken, and onion and stir gently to combine.
5. Each morning, cut a pita in half an stuff with chicken salad and lettuce.