My mom was often looking through Cooking Light and her Betty Crocker cookbook for dinner ideas and one day she found this “Mexican Chef Salad” and was so excited to make it. It’s red leaf lettuce, ground beef, tortilla chips, cucumbers, tomatoes, cheddar, and my mom used the Zesty Italian Dressing. So, not exactly authentically “Mexican”, but hey, it was the 90’s. To this day, it’s still one of my favorite things that she cooks and yesterday, while a new storm was blasting it’s way off the mountain, I could think of nothing else more satisfying. Of course, I ended-up doing more of a riff off of the original and I think she’d approve.
Instead of ground beef, I cooked 2 chicken breasts (this was a salad for 2) in the iron skillet and then added some ground cumin and coriander at the end during the last bit of browning so that I didn’t burn the spices while searing the chicken.
While that was going:
I sliced 1/2 of a cucumber super thin and put it into a large bowl with some salt,
the juice and zest of 1 lime,
1 clove of garlic, grated on the microplane,
1 scallion, sliced thin
1/2 of a jalapeño, brunoised (super tiny dice)
1 handful of cilantro and mint, roughly chopped
some extra virgin olive oil to make it a little saucy- this served as the vinaigrette.
Once the chicken was cooked, I cut it into a bite sized dice and tossed that into the cucumber mix,
then added a full head of beautiful red leaf lettuce that I’d gotten from the farmstand and lastly, crumbled some of our fave “Have’a Corn Chips” tortilla chips to the mix.
I added avocado to mine, but Eric loathes it, so he didn’t get any.
And that was dinner. You could certainly use a rotisserie chicken and just sauté it up in some oil with the spices if you want. And, while I prefer to cook with seasonal ingredients, the accessibility to those ingredients in the quality that I want is pretty sparse in a Tahoe winter, so I used a cucumber and jalapeño, even though it’s not summer. But I omitted the tomatoes because that’s one fruit I refuse to budge on. They are gross out of season, I don’t care what you say! hahaha
This could also so easily become a vegan dish with some crispy cumin-y seasoned chickpeas and/ or broiled tofu in place of the chicken.
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