Chicken salad with fennel

Lots of leftover chicken from corporate catering trays will only grace so many salads before you get really tired of salad-topped-with-chicken. So yesterday I started thinking about other things to do with chicken.

"Hmm," I thought, "I haven't had any chicken salad in a while. Chicken salad would be really good."

"But I don't have any celery," I told myself, "and my mayo supply is perilously low. Plus I don't have any sour cream." (I like my chicken salad with half-mayo, half-sour cream.)

"Oh!" I thought then. "I have another bulb of fennel, courtesy of my CSA. Fennel is kind of like celery, right? Oh, and I just made a fresh batch of homemade Greek yogurt--maybe I could combine that with what's left of the mayo, instead of sour cream."

So I did just that. I cut up the leftover chicken, thinly sliced the bulb of fennel, and added a little chopped Vidalia onion. To that I added a 1/3 cup mayo or so, with a small container of yogurt. Then I threw in a dollop of the fennel pesto I made last week, some sliced almonds, and added salt and pepper to taste.

You probably already know I'm not a huge fan of fennel. But you know what? This chicken salad kicked ass. The fennel and fennel pesto together gave the whole thing a brightness that chicken salad doesn't normally have, and the tang of the yogurt balanced that perfectly. Plus it wasn't too fennel-y.