Kitchen Adventures: Chinese Chicken Salad

Recently, part of my focus in my "quest to adulthood" has been cooking for myself. I love baking, but cooking has always seemed like more of a nuisance. Then I got tired of eating the same thing every day. So I cracked open some cookbooks and discovered that it wasn't as intimidating as I'd thought.

One of the things I actually like about cooking is that it's much less strict than baking. If you're making a cake and don't measure everything exactly right, you could end up with a disaster. But you can make a bunch of changes when cooking and actually end up with something better than the original recipe.

Take, for example, the Chinese Chicken Salad Chop Cups recipe I found. The idea for these appetizers was to make individual salads using wonton wrappers. Well, I decided to modify it a bit since a) I did not want to buy/prepare wonton wrappers and b) I wanted to make something I could easily bring to work for lunch. So I just cut the wrappers out of the recipe and followed all the other directions. This is what I ended up with:

Chinese Chicken Salad

Not bad right? Normally I am not a salad person, but the "Asian Almonds" (made with soy sauce, sesame oil, cayenne, garlic powder, and ground ginger) add a lot of flavor; and the chicken makes it more filling but still healthy. By removing the 4 steps and 30 minutes it would take to add the wonton wrappers to this recipe, I made it much simpler and much easier to eat as a lunch.

Want to try it yourself? I totally recommend "Pretty Delicious" by Candice Kumai. I've made a bunch of recipes from her cookbook and all of them have turned out fabulous.