As I’ve written before, I absolutely love salads, especially cold salads in the summertime. I regularly make two or three different kinds on Sunday evenings, and we have them for dinner for the next few days. My usuals are pasta salad, potato salad and chicken salad, and the ingredients consist of pretty much whatever I have in the fridge and cupboard that week.
I mentioned making chicken salad to my friend Ms. Gwen a couple of weeks ago, and she asked how I make it. She said she just buys it and adds a little celery and stuff (?) 
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There’s no simple answer to that, I have a lot of variations, but for all of them, I cook chicken breasts, shred or chop them and add diced onions and celery, and enough sour cream and mayo (1/2 of each) to get it as moist as I like it, salt and pepper.
Some of my variations, to the above…
…sometimes I add curry powder, just as much as we like (I love that one),
…or sometimes, I add shredded parmesan cheese (very good),
… this past week I chopped some fresh basil leaves from my herb garden and added them,
…sometimes I add artichoke hearts chopped up (yum)
…sometimes I leave out the onions and add mandarin orange sections, grapes and walnuts
…sometimes I make a Southwestern version with black olives, chopped red onion, cumin, chili power (anything else I have around, red peppers, etc.)
There are so many possibilities. It’s really fun to just look around and see what you have and figure out the flavors that work together. My daughter is beginning to really get into cooking (she’s 23, getting a little domestic, yeah!), and has a little trouble with this concept. She thinks she has to religiously follow recipes, but I’m working on her…showing her that it’s really fun to think outside the recipe box.
This week I added chopped basil leaves to our curry chicken salad. I’ll be taking that same variation to Ms. Gwen’s house tomorrow for her husband’s birthday party.
Basil Curry Chicken Salad
I’d love to hear if any of you have any fun variations to standard recipes.
Pasta salad…possibilities are endless! My standard is tri-colored rotini pasta, halved grape tomatoes, sliced black olives, chopped red onion, and chopped bell peppers. For the dressing I use olive oil, Italian dressing, Italian seasonings, parsley, seasoned salt (Tony’s) and garlic powder.
I have included cubed cheese, leftover meat like sausage or turkey, all varieties of bell peppers..whatever veggies you like could be added. We’ve also experimented with various types of pasta. I think a ranch-type dressing would be good, too. If you put whatever you like in there, it will be delicious!
OK, don’t know what happened, tried to write this and lost it, so you may get it may show up 14 times…
…anyway, the pasta salad that you made for the girls for dinner the last time Courtney and I were over looked awesome, all kinds of things in it…I did take note, and last night added cubed cheese in ours…had never thought of that, it was very good.
Courtney is coming over tonight, we’re going to make a huge pasta salad for her to take for lunches to work this week. It’ll probably look a lot like yours
Thanks for the input.