Curried Chicken Salad

I'm sorry loyal blog readers!  I've been on vacation and away from my blog but here is a little something I made before I went on vacation.  I am trying to use up the so-called random ingredients in my house before buying even more random ingredients.  At Thanksgiving I bought some mayonnaise for my bacon wrapped asparagus with garlic aioli.  I never use mayo so I was trying to think of something I wanted to make that would have mayo in it besides aioli.  I didn't want to make my own salad dressing (because I am lazy) but I like chicken salad and thought, 'If I could only find a good recipe for it!'  So I used my mad Internet searching skills and didn't find anything appealing.  I realize that most chicken salads have raisins or grapes or other such things I'm not eating, but I just could not find a satisfying recipe that I actually wanted to try until I checked out Against All Grains by Danielle Walker.

On page 102 I found a recipe for curried chicken salad.  I like curry and I like chicken salad so I decided to try it out.  Of course I had to omit some ingredients like grapes and celery (okay I didn't have to omit celery; I just didn't want to buy an entire fresh celery stalk for 1/8 cup of chopped celery).  The curry spice mix also called for ground fenugreek and I could only find fenugreek (and I don't have a grinder) so I used curry powder instead.  And I was too lazy to toast the cashews.  But otherwise I followed the recipe and it turned out great.  I ate mine on top of a big salad with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and avocado.  I tried some garlic dressing on it too but the flavors clashed.  When I had "leftovers" with ranch dressing it was much more delicious. 

*Note: Danielle Walker does have a website but this recipe isn't included on it. Sorry...go check out the book!