Give this Apple Walnut Chicken Salad a try for a busy night! Even though it’s winter I am always on the look out for a fresh, healthy and delicious main dish salad. We love to have salads for dinner to help switch up the heaviness of some weeknight meals. This salad is one of our favorites and I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about it before.
It’s a simple salad with apples, pears, spinach, bacon and everything yummy you want in a dinner salad. To make this meal even more simple, you can always used Thrive Life Freeze Dried Chicken to make it come together in just minutes. This is one of my favorite meal-hacks to help make things easy and quick to get fresh meals on the table FAST!
Ingredients
- 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts cooked and cubed-seasoned
- 1 lb. bacon cooked, drained and crumbled
- 6 cups romaine lettuce chopped
- 2 cups baby spinach
- 2 apples cored and cut into cubes
- 6 Tbs. walnuts or pecans can be candied in brown sugar & butter
- 1 cup crumbled blue cheese gorgonzola or feta
- 1 red bell pepper diced
- Croutons
- DRESSING:
- 1/3 cup olive oil
- 1/4-1/2 cup sugar
- 1 cup apple juice
- 2 Tbs. dijon mustard
- 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
- 1 1/2 Tbs. dehydrated onions
- 1 tsp. salt
Instructions
- Cook the chicken (whether on a grill or sauted in a pan) and cook until no longer pink in the center. Cut the chicken into bite sized pieces and season with salt and pepper. Cook bacon until crisp. Drain the bacon on a paper towel and let the bacon cool enough to crumble (can use precooked bacon crumbs to save time).
- Cut the romaine lettuce, spinach, dice the apples, and chop the bell pepper and place in a large salad bowl. Crumble the bacon and add to the salad. Crumble the blue cheese and croutons on top of the salad. Add the candied walnuts to the top of the salad. You can buy these candied nuts predone or you can make them yourself (recipe is on our blog).
- For the dressing, combine all of the dressing ingredients and whisk together until smooth (you can also puree with a hand wand/whisk if you would like). Serve dressing on top of the salad.
