Delicious Reading: Eat This Much: “Asian” Chicken Salad

I like to show my intercultural communication students a skit by Margaret Cho, a Korean-American comedian, where she describes being served lunch on an airplane. She pantomimes the male flight attendant going down the aisle delivering the plates and announcing to each passenger, “Asian chicken salad … Asian chicken salad …” then he gets to her. He pauses. He looks at the salad. He looks at her. He looks back at the salad. He swallows, then gingerly offers, “...chicken salad?”

Brooke Clubbs

Margaret jokes that perhaps he expected her to cry out, “This is not the salad of my people!”

I tell my students about the Americanized versions of international flavors and encourage them to go outside their comfort zones, but the recipe I am sharing today is definitely only “inspired by” cuisine from Asia.

I recently started using the site “Eat This Much” (eatthismuch.com) to help me with meal planning. I had been developing a bad habit of eating low-calorie foods that weren’t necessarily healthy. This site shows a pie chart of your protein, fat and carb consumption as you log what you eat throughout the day, and additional nutritional information is just a click away. The site suggests a meal plan for each day, and, if you get the premium subscription at $40/year, it will even provide you with a grocery list for the week. Some of the foods require little explanation (such as a banana for a snack), but others include recipes. It was the balsamic-soy chicken that inspired the salad. Rather than prepare the chicken and two vegetable sides, I decided the flavors of the baked chicken would go well in a salad that eats like a meal.

__Ingredients__

3 large or 5 small chicken breasts

5 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce

5 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon ginger

1 bag mixed spring greens

1 cup shredded carrots

½ cup slivered almonds

½ cup ginger sesame dressing (I used Newman’s Own, but you could choose another brand, or make your own dressing)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together the soy sauce, vinegar and spices, then marinate the chicken breasts in it while the oven heats. Transfer the chicken to a baking sheet. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and no longer pink.

Toss together the lettuce, shredded carrots and slivered almonds. Slice the chicken and add to the salad.Toss with the dressing and serve.

Serves 5.