Huntsville Hot Chicken Salad

I have 2 food stories for today. The first is that I had the most brilliant idea of putting the leftover mushroom ragout from last night (the fish was gone) over brown rice for lunch. After I caused a deformity in my plastic spoon from sticking it in the rice too fast after it came out of the microwave, then proceeded to burn my tongue shortly after (I know, I know – the spoon should’ve been a clue, right?)… then it really was quite a delicious lunch. I’ll just skip the painful preface next time and go straight to the delicacy!

The second story is dinner. I made it wrong and it still turned out well. I love when that happens! I had on the menu hot chicken salad, crescent rolls, and a salad tossed with nuts, mandarin oranges, and apples. It is pretty hard to mess up crescent rolls (unless you burn them which, thankfully, I didn’t) or tossing a salad together (especially when you’re the one deciding what to put in it). So that leaves the chicken salad. The hot chicken salad was a brand new recipe out of an equally new cookbook. It came out of Open Doors, A Collection of Recipes from First United Methodist Church in Huntsville, AL, a cookbook given to us as a wedding gift.

It was a yummy, easy mixture of cooked chicken, celery, green pepper, onion, pimientos, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and cream of chicken soup all tossed together, topped with crushed potato chips and baked. Perfect for a weeknight meal. So how could I make that incorrectly? Well, at the grocery store, I 1)forgot the pimientos and 2)grabbed a cream of potato off the shelf instead of a cream of chicken. Woops. As I am standing in the kitchen, mid-celery-chop, I debated briefly about running to the store for the right ingredients, but the oven was already pre-heated, it was getting late already, and on top of that, it was raining.

So instead, I made hot chicken salad without pimientos and with cream of potato soup. And you know what is one of the greatest things about cooking? A lot of the time, maybe even most of the time, it really doesn’t matter what or where you substitute, make things up, or make a change up for a certain preference. It will still taste good. In fact, I could have not even told you about my blunder at all and instead said I made those adjustments intentionally. But where is the amusement in that? Sometimes it is just as fun to share your cooking mishaps. As I said, it was still a perfect weeknight meal, tasty even with a few potato chunks thrown in. And hey, the potato tied right in with the chip topping…