I really wanted to do something for dinner that incorporated strawberries into a main dish salad the other day. I swear I have seen a grilled chicken recipe topped with avocado and strawberries somewhere very recently, but of course I now can’t find it anywhere. Since I couldn’t find the avocado recipe, I turned to a recent issue of Cooking Light magazine and opted to make this Grilled Chicken Salad with Strawberries and Feta.
Feta cheese has pretty much become a staple at our house. I buy it by the large bucket or block at Sam’s Club, and then use it as many ways as we can for a few weeks. We just love it. It adds flavor and salt to any salad we sprinkle on, but where I’ve found it really is dynamic is in dishes that get baked. I love adding feta to pasta or scalloped potatoes, or anything that has a cream sauce. As you’re eating it you come upon these little nuggets of warm, melty feta, and they just make me very, very happy. I thought sweet strawberries and salty feta sounded like a perfect match, so this salad was just the thing to try that idea out.
I made two changes to the recipe. One was that I ditched the red onions. Oh, I could totally taste them in the final salad, they would have been great. However, I try to avoid raw onions in salads for our family, as some don’t care for them, and some have lingering digestive effects after eating raw onions. We still have them occasionally, but in this case, I thought there was enough flavor going on that I could skip the onions and all would be well. My second major change was not using the arugula. I cannot stand arugula! So much so, that when I looked at the mesclun mix I’d planted in my garden and saw that most of the leaves in the mix were arugula, I simply pulled the whole patch out and planted cantaloupe instead. I really don’t like peppery greens. Instead, I used a mix of fresh spinach and mizuna from my garden. The fresh spinach was spectacular- I think it was way better than arugula could have been. So I’m altering the recipe to call for baby spinach instead.
The only change I would make to this salad is with regards to the marinating time for the chicken. My chicken marinated for ten minutes, and it wasn’t near long enough. Balsamic is such a strong flavor, and yet the 15 minutes I gave the chicken in the marinade wasn’t enough. The next time I will put the chicken in the marinade and pop it in the fridge for an hour, provided I have the time. Andy cooked the chicken for me on the grill outside, but you could certainly use a grill pan inside if that’s what you’d like to do.
Now that I’m looking at this picture again, I remember thinking that this would also be delicious with some kind of toasted nut or seed tossed in it. Pumpkin seeds would be great, as would toasted walnuts or pecans.
