Buffalo Chicken Salad! (Or Tofu if you are a veggie!)

See I told you I would get to my version of a Buffalo Chicken Salad! (About Me section)

Soooooo I love hot sauce. You may have noticed that. If not, you will. I literally drink the stuff. I have actually literally guzzled hot sauce straight from the bottle for a photo shoot and let it dribble down my chin and onto my chest like some overzealous yet still glam contest eater that raps…. huh??? … That is another story. Let me have a little mystery ;P

So anyway. With that in mind. I came up with this idea one night and upon googling discovered that MANY OTHER PEOPLE also came to this conclusion. That buffalo chicken deserved it’s own salad. I mean they serve wings with a side of veggies in dip. It was basically begging to become a salad!

So here is my version. This is a dish I make and a dish I like.

Shallot Dressing:

• 1 shallot (if you don’t have shallots you can switch for a few cloves of garlic – it will be a more robust flavour but I do this too sometimes and it’s great)
  
• White wine vinegar (1 part)
• Cracked pepper (as much as you like)
• Himalyan salt (sea salt is fine – a few dashes)
• Olive oil (2 parts)
• Honey or cane sugar (enough to balance the acidity and give it smoothness)

Put everything in a blender or container that works with a hand blender and blend til smooth. Amounts are approximate so please adjust to taste!

Chicken: (Or Tofu if you are veggie)

• Chicken breast cut into bite sized chunks
• Seasoning (I like peri peri personally, but you can just use salt/pepper if you like – if using anything else just make sure it works with Buffalo sauce!)
• Olive oil

Cook chicken in heated/oiled pan til golden edges form and chicken is firm with a little bounce. You can check a couple larger pieces for doneness.

Buffalo Sauce:

• Butter (1 part)
• Frank’s Hot Sauce (1 part)

Melt butter in a pot, add in hot sauce. Stir to combine.

NOTE: you can also use some Habenero or Sriracha if you want to augment the flavour a bit. Frank’s is classic. But my bottle was almost empty so this time I added in 3 diff red hot sauces to make up for it and it was still a great flavour. So you can definitely play around with it. Chipotle hot sauce would be a nice addition too!

The Veggies:

• Avocado sliced
• Carrots julienned, grated or shaved with a peeler (I love this with yellow carrots especially but my grocery store didn’t have them this time)
• Bibb/Boston/Butter Lettuce and/or Romaine (washed and cut into skinny-ish strips)
• **English Cucumber sliced into coins – or those small ones used for pickling dills (**optional – I didn’t have any this time)

Blue Cheese:

• Crumbled blue cheese (that was easy!)

Just pick your favorite kind! But I would personally use a Danish one like Rosenborg for that classic Buffalo Chicken with Blue Cheese flavour! Although in saying that, this time I tried it with Castello Blue Cheese but I found it to be a little saltier and not as creamy.

To Assemble:

Put your greens on a plate. Top with avocado, carrots, and cucumber if you have it. I don’t like celery on a salad so I don’t do celery here you may have noticed. (Ummmmmm I’m pretty sure avocado WINS so I switch out celery for everyone’s favorite fruit/veggie/healthy fat – AVO!) Top with chicken and drizzle on Buffalo sauce. Add the blue cheese crumbles and then drizzle shallot dressing all over everything!

Here are the snaps!

NOTE: to make this vegetarian you could frie up some firm tofu in a pan with olive oil and then use instead of chicken! Woohoo. Easy right?!

Homemade shallot white wine vinegar dressing!

I LOVE this salad. Mainly because I love the taste of Buffalo wings but I don’t actually enjoy eating wings. Too much sinewy, veiny, skin-y weirdness for me. And sticky, greasy fingers etc.. Plus the blue cheese dip and celery is usually pretty LAME! I want to taste my blue cheese not have it all mixed up with a mountain of globular, questionable, dairy or mayo or who knows what. No really I just really like these flavours as a salad.