comment icon 70 more comments This salad is my life right now. The textures, the flavors, and the perfect amount of light, sweet honey lemon vinaigrette… Sigh. One thing that we struggle with here in the Philippines is cooking. Hot, heated, high temperature cooking. Our oven has a flame in it. A real live fire. IT’S HOT. Plus it’s already one bajillion degrees and one hundred and fifty percent humid all day everyday, so that’s fun. To add to the drama, we are a microwaveless family (do two people count as a family?), which I really want to enjoy, except that not having a quick way to heat up food usually sets off a chain of events, starting with turning the oven on –> extreme hotnesss –> grouchy-ness –> hair issues –> resorting to cold cereal and milk. The good news in all this is that they have some really yummy cereals at our little Rustan’s grocery store down the road (hi, tropical fruit granola with huge clusters of coconut) and the other good news is that I love cereal. Period. But cereal cuts a deep wound when I find out that Bjork has been ignoring the delicious man-food that I left in the fridge in little individual containers for his lunches and choosing cereal for lunch instead. What? Individual containers of squash soup with walnuts and apple aren’t man-foody? Whatever. This is our real life. With a fridge full of food, he eats tropical fruit grocery store granola just to avoid the heat of the kitchen. Hmmph. Then we get into this horrible, old-married-people cycle where I come home from work and interrogate him about what he ate for lunch and be annoyed that he had a bowl of cereal instead of my individually packaged squash soup with a separate container of walnut and apple toppings. We are those people. Ok, I am that person. Oh my gosh, you guys. WHY did I wait this long? I made this chicken salad with grapes and the old-married-people cycle of “what did you eat for lunch” was immediately broken. We both loved it. He made his into a wrap, and then a sandwich, and then two more wraps with extra cheese. I ate mine in a big bowl as a salad. With extra cheese. And by the way, finding feta cheese in the Philippines is like finding pure gold. It’s been a happy week in this house. If you have access to fresh, clean, crispy greens like baby spinach, toss a handful of it in there, too, will ya? Trust me – it will be delicious. It reminds me of this salad. I miss spinach. <– File that under things you’ll only say once in your life. The salad? It was cold. It was refreshing. It was chewy and crunchy and sweet. It was filling and it was man-food. Er, at least, as much as feta and honey lemon and grapes in a salad can be man-food. Yeah? Yeah. The best part: it can be kept in the fridge in individual containers for easy eating – NO REHEATING REQUIRED. Saves time, saves sweat, saves … us. This salad is pretty and delicious and I love it. We are celebrating by buying a microwave. Just kidding. But actually, maybe we should get one. I dunno. Thoughts? 4.9 from 9 reviews For now, honey lemon chicken salad with feta is on the menu alllll week and life is good. Life. Is. Good.
