Chicken Salad

A chicken salad that holds three days, what to portion on Sunday, and why poaching plain chicken beats a store rotisserie bird for a celiac week.

Makes

4 lunches

Hands on

15 min

Start to finish

40 min

Keeps

3 days in the fridge. Do not freeze it, mayonnaise splits.

• 2boneless chicken breastsPoached plain rather than pulled off a rotisserie bird, which arrives injected and rubbed with a seasoning you then have to read.
• 1/2 cupmayonnaise
• 2 stalkscelery, diced small
• 1 cupred grapes, halved
• 1 teaspoonDijon mustard
• 1 tablespoonlemon juice
• salt and pepper

1. Run the gluten free cooking first that day, on a clean board and a clean pot, before anything else goes on the stove. One contaminated pan on Sunday goes into five lunches instead of one.
2. Poach the chicken breasts in salted water at a bare simmer for 15 minutes, then let them cool in the liquid.
3. Dice the chicken and fold half of it with the mayonnaise, celery, grapes, mustard and lemon juice. Keep the rest plain and undressed.
4. Dress that second half Tuesday night. Celery and grapes weep once they are dressed, and a four day old dressed salad is watery.
5. Cool anything hot uncovered and spread shallow before you seal it. A lid on warm food is what makes a batch smell sour by midweek.
6. Portion into single lunch containers while everything is out, and write the date on each lid. One big tub in the fridge means five minutes of spooning at 7am.
7. Keep the same day jobs off the Sunday list. Rice balls get made that morning, sandwiches get built the night before at the earliest, and avocado and cut apple go in on the day.

1. Two ice packs frozen solid overnight, one under the container and one on top, both touching it. Cold falls, so the top one does more work, and this sits in a warm classroom from 8am until noon.
2. An insulated bag, not a paper sack or a backpack pocket.
3. Test the whole set of containers with your kid at home once. A locking clip lid that needs two hands and a countertop does not get opened at a cafeteria table.
4. Let the Sunday batch be the main dish only and fill the rest of the box with things that need no work: fruit, a cheese stick, carrots, a boiled egg.

• There is water pooled in the container and it smells sour on day three. It was sealed while still warm.
• The chicken salad has gone watery and separated. Celery and grapes weep once dressed. Dress two days at a time instead of all four lunches on Sunday.
• The ice pack is soft and the bag is warm when it comes home. The pack was not frozen through, or one pack was cooling a whole bag on its own.
• The chicken is dry and stringy. The water boiled rather than simmered, or the meat came out of the liquid to cool. A bare simmer and cooling in the liquid fixes both.

Rotisserie chicken is the ingredient to read on a batch day, and it is the reason this recipe poaches plain breasts instead. Most store birds are injected with a solution and rubbed with a seasoning blend, and modified food starch and wheat based flavorings both turn up in those lists, so one bird carries into five lunches rather than one. Mayonnaise is made with distilled vinegar and is not usually a concern, though a flavored or light version has added thickeners worth a look. Celery, grapes, Dijon mustard and lemon are single ingredient foods. The bigger risk on a batch day is the kitchen rather than the label: a wooden spoon, a scratched cutting board and a flour dusted counter are all harder to clean than they look, which is why the gluten free food gets cooked first.