Italian Chicken Salad Lettuce Cups

 

These were the perfect bite for healthy eating after the holidays.  I absolutely love the beautifully big leaves of butter lettuce.  This dish has inspired me to figure out what else I can nestle into these leaves....  We served these as an appetizer before dinner one night and they were a huge hit.  Easy to pick up, and healthy too.  Needless to say, I took them to work over the next few days for lunch (I assemble at work though, not beforehand.  Otherwise the lettuce leaves would get soggy).  What's in them?  Shredded chicken - and yes, I went with rotisserie chicken for convenience.  It's already cooked perfectly so that shredding is a piece of cake!  The chicken gets tossed with red onions, which I sliced on a mandoline so they were paper thin in the hopes that none of my guests would bite down on an overwhelmingly large piece of onion.   Roasted red peppers, parsley, and parmesan were also finely chopped/shredded and thrown in the mix.  The dressing for the filling was what really drew me to these - when I think of chicken salad, the first thing I think of is..... mayo.  No thank you.  Mayo does nothing to help me out in holiday recovery :)  My sister-in-law must have been thinking along the same lines when she shared this recipe with me....This dressing is a lot lighter: red wine vinegar, fresh lemon juice, olive oil, honey, s&p.  Nice, right?  Of course, I used my mini-cuisinart so the dressing was perfectly blended.  

Make them again? I am interested in making lettuce cups of all sorts now :)  Especially because these were butter lettuce leaves, which are way better than romaine or iceberg lettuce due to the fact that the leaves are way more flexible when you fold them around your food.

Improvements:  Yes, this recipe will need some tweaking for my tastes.  It came from Giada, who chose to also put in almonds and capers, which I omitted.  Capers = no thank you.  Almonds - I just didn't have any on hand.  Next time maybe.  But I also felt that the dressing was too much for the ingredients - it seemed too 'wet' in my opinion.  I'd use less dressing in the future and also throw in more vegetables for crunch and texture.  Maybe cucumber or celery or fresh bell pepper.

Here's the recipe:  

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/italian-chicken-salad-in-lettuce-cups-recipe/index.html  

Thanks Giada!