Avocado Chicken Salad

Avocado Chicken Salad with a Side of Bliss

Costco is dabomb dot com, amirite? Good quality food, reasonable prices on organics, and if that weren't enough, there's also samples! The one little adaptation we have to make is how to use up the large quantities we buy before they spoil. This is especially true with avocadoes. You know how those things  are

Cartoon credit veganfortheweek.com

So when you have 6 avocados ripen all at once, you have about a 24 hour/17 minute window to use them all in all their delicious and nutritious glory. Here's a good way to use 2 of them. This recipe works for doubling too, so that's 4 of your bag of costco avocados. You can also mush them and then freeze them for later date guacamole so there's the other 2 used up. See I'm giving you recipes and doing math for you. You're welcome. In the meantime while you're double-checking my math (not a bad idea), make this dish because it's proof God loves us, I swear:

Ingredients: 
1 pkg (1.5-2lbs) chicken, cooked and cubed/chopped 
2 avocados cubed/chopped 
1 cup dried basil or 2 cups fresh 
3 cloves of garlic, smashed with the flat of the blade of your knife, not just diced (think 6th Harry Potter book) 
1/4 cup olive oil 
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar 
1 1/2 tablespoons lime or lemon juice, or a combination thereof 
1 teaspoon each salt, pepper, and cumin

Directions: 
1 - Put everything except the the chicken and avocado in a food processor and blend. Make sure to scrape the sides of the bowl with a spatula and then re-blend to ensure everything gets blended together 
2 - Toss your chicken and avocado in a medium bowl 
3 - Pour the thick sauce from the food processor over the chicken and avocados and stir until just blended (don't overdo the mixing or you may start to mush the avocados. Unless you want that more traditional creamy chicken salad texture. My gym buddy Jay Nellie recommends doing it this way and her taste and judgment are flawless so you have my blessing to go either way on this).
4 - Dish it up over a bed of lettuce or greens, or scoop up as is 
5 - taste bud boogie

Serves 3-4, or 2 crossfitters

You can substitute basil with cilantro; you can add some red onion or chives to make it ever zippier, but don't underdo the garlic. So much yum! Enjoy!

I know, my Moto X phone takes pulitzer-worthy photos, right? But you get the idea. Plus, even if it doesn't look like this, it will taste good; I'm pretty sure it's culinarily impossible for these ingredients to get together and not taste good. So you're golden. Also, my dictionary informs me that culinarily is not a word. That thing is forever trying to squelch by linguistic creativity. #dictionariesgonnadictate

UPDATE:

When you thaw frozen avocados they thaw squishy and turn roughly the shade of a gym sock. They're no good for using in the above recipe when you need firm avocado chunks. So, to make this recipe using thawed 'cados, I recommend tossing them right in the food processor along with everything else. This creates a very creamy sauce for your chicken. While the sauce is the star of this dish in many ways, you probably still want something besides chicken in the base. I chopped up some salted cashews and combined them with the chicken before putting the yummy thick sauce over the top of both and it was yum city. This also kicks the protein count straight through the roof. Unless you just completed Murph, you probably are not going to want to curl up with a big bowl of this because you will get full much too fast. My tip would be to throw a heaping cup or two on top of some greens to make a complete meal out of it. Any way you slice it this dish will be great and so will you!