I whipped up some chicken salad last night and it came out so incredibly delicious, I had to post about it. Honestly these are just instructions for cooking the chicken breasts. The salad part was just a bagged salad. The simplicity is a feature!

I got about three chicken breasts and coated them with some olive oil and heavily seasoned them with some Italian Seasoning. I preheated my oven to 350 degrees and put the three breasts on a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil (Easy clean up!). I let them cook for about 25-30 minutes and then I started to check them with my meat thermometer every 5-7 minutes. The chicken breasts were different sizes so they all cooked at different rates. The instant a breast hit 170 degrees, I would take it out off of the tray and put it on the cutting board. Every degree over 170 you cook it, you just lose moisture! Don't overcook your chicken!

Alton Brown suggested you cut Turkey breast meat across the grain instead of with it. He mentions this helps keep the moisture inside of the actual meat. Remembering this tip, I cut each breast across the grain into 1/4" thick slices. Some of the bigger slices I did cut in half with the grain, just because some of the slices were too big for a salad! I tried a few pieces and they were incredibly moist. Then I put all the sliced up chicken breast meat into a gallon zip lock bag with the bagged salad.

Shake up that bag once you get all the chicken in there and serve! The chicken to greens ratio in my salad was skewed very much towards the chicken, but I wanted a lot of chicken in the salad! One bag of salad + three breasts will be enough for about 3, maybe 4 servings.

As an extra note, I could have marinated the chicken in some Italian dressing beforehand, however I was hungry before I decided to go buy the chicken, so I just cooked it right away.