Review: Little Salad Bar Chicken Salads

Chicken salad is a romantic food. Or at least, it's good for picnics. When I was in my last year of being a teen, I asked out this much older man for a bike ride and a picnic and then panicked. What the hell was I going to make that would impress him (but not require extravagant culinary skills or time away from like, smoking weed and watching boring-ass Criterion Collection films on my desktop computer)? I needed something that would transport well, be tasty, and pair easily with other picnic foods. And then I remembered this delicious chicken salad my mom made with red grapes, walnuts, and celery. (Sorry I used your recipe to seduce an inappropriately-aged dude, Ma.)

Fast forward to 6 years later and I am still using that chicken salad recipe to impress people I'm trying to get with ('sup, Jen!). When my girlfriend B. bought the cranberry-almond chicken salad a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised and then mostly forgot about it. Until about week ago when I was at Aldi wondering if 239 out of 240 days is too many to eat some variation of a peanut butter sandwich for lunch (no) and found myself in front of the chicken salad. 

I rarely stray from my standard lunch of a peanut butter sandwich, carrots with hummus, yogurt, and a piece of fruit. My work involves a lot of physical labor and that's the amount of food I need to get me comfortably through a long shift; any change in that menu might cause me to be hungry at a weird time (and will definitely cause me to be hypervigilant in monitoring myself for hunger: "Oh my god, did my stomach just growl? God DAMN it, I knew I should have just brought a sandwich. Why did I think change was positive? Change is bad and scary. What am I going to do now, go to the vending machine and eat pretzels like some kind of animal with poor executive function?")

But I figured I could bring the chicken salad instead of an apple and eat that when it got to my end-of-shift break (not officially sanctioned by my workplace but a good idea if I don't want to lose my shit during my 12th straight hour of care-taking). 

Pictured: cranberry-almond chicken salad with precisely-measured lunch items

Plus, this chicken salad makes a good dinner with crackers if you haven't bothered to cook anything. It's got a little kick of sweetness, some nice big chunks of chicken, a creamy texture, and some crunch to it. The only real issue I had with it is that it has a little too much mayonnaise--you're going to want something fresh and green to go along with it. Still, it's good enough to bring on a picnic and lie and say you made it yourself and probably that person will think, "Wow, this person seems really competent and sexy and if she can make chicken salad like this without breaking a sweat, just imagine what other stuff she can do. I wonder what our kids will be named?" 

A few days later I found myself intrigued by the chipotle chicken salad. This was much less good. You'd think the creaminess combined with a little spicy chipotle flavor would pair nicely, but, confusingly, you'd be wrong. Something about this one just didn't taste right. Maybe the weirdness of the onion, or the black beans/corn kernels that were just numerous enough to be noticeable, but not frequent enough to impart any real flavor into the mixture, and giving it a distressingly creepy appearance.

That's how many corn kernels are in there for real

Plus, as B. pointed out, these chicken salads are full of preservatives. It was a little similar to that man I dated all those years ago--after a few days I started to worry that maybe this stuff was going to make me throw up. That's not to say it isn't delicious--it's just not for the long-term. 

Verdict: Pretty good, under the right circumstances. Go get some, find someone your own age (or not, I guess, I'm not your dad), and settle down to watch some 1960s French guy get his face eaten by dogs on your 2001 desktop PC.