Ricken Chicken Salad

This delicious and easy, healthy chicken salad is made up of the best and most unexpected flavors and ingredients - curry, marsala wine, capers, walnuts, raisins and celery. This is my Dad's famous chicken salad that he has been making for years now - his name is Rick, and Charlie coined it "Ricken Salad." This Ricken chicken salad is perfect for picnics, barbecues, potlucks, or meal prep for lunches for the week. I am so excited to bring you guys my Dad's famous chicken salad recipe!

What do I need to make this recipe?

Chicken

• For this Ricken chicken salad recipe, I will be using boiled chicken breast.
• If you are crunched on time, you could use rotisserie chicken or canned chicken, but fresh is always best! I highly recommend boiling your chicken for this recipe.
• Make sure you let the chicken cool and chill before you mix together all of the ingredients. I recommend putting the chicken in the fridge to chill before mixing it.

Dry ingredients

You can feel free to add any of your favorite dry ingredients or omit any of the ones you don't like from this list, but this is what this Ricken chicken salad recipe calls for:

• Raisins
• Red onion (you'll dice this!)
• Celery (you'll dice this, too)
• Chopped walnuts

Sauce mix

Here are the things you'll need to make the sauce mix for this chicken salad:

• Mayo (I used light mayo to make this - I think regular definitely tastes better, but if you want to scale back on calories/points, you can use light mayo too!)
• Marsala wine
• Lemon
• Curry powder
• Capers
• Hot Hoagie spread (like Tallaricos or Cento)

How do I make Ricken chicken salad?

• The first thing you'll want to do is boil the chicken. As I mentioned above, if you are in a crunch, you can use canned or rotisserie chicken, but I highly recommend boiling it. Make sure you let it cool and chill in the fridge afterwards!
• Mix together the dry ingredients including the raisins, walnuts, red onion, and celery.
• Make the sauce by mixing together the light mayo, hot hoagie spread (don't worry, the Ricken chicken salad won't be spicy!), marsala wine, lemon, curry powder, capers, and salt and pepper.
• Once the chicken is cool/chilled, introduce the dry ingredients.
• Then, introduce the sauce in small amounts to get to the proportions of sauce to chicken you prefer. We add all of the sauce in this recipe! If you don't use it all, you could reserve the extra sauce for those who may want to put additional sauce on their individual serving.

What should I do with the chicken salad?

First of all, this Ricken chicken salad is AMAZING for meal prep! You can make it on a Sunday and have it for lunches throughout the week. Here are a few ideas of what you can do with the chicken salad throughout the week:

• Make sandwiches or pitas. Any bread will do!
• Add the chicken salad to salads.
• Eat it alone and use chips or veggies to scoop it!
• Serve over a bed of lettuce.

If you're not feeling chicken salad and would prefer something different, check out my Lightened-Up Easy Weeknight Chicken Broccoli Alfredo!

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