Copycat Lean Cuisine Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad Topper
If you think that you can’t prep healthy, hearty salads ahead of time, you are dead wrong! Of course you can’t freeze lettuce because of the high water content. But you can freeze all sorts of toppings, such as this Copycat Lean Cuisine Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad Topper!
When I have a salad for a meal, I don’t want to feel like I am eating a salad. I want it to be a hearty meal, full of toppings of varied texture and tastes. I want it piled high with meat, fresh vegetables and homemade dressing.
A life long fan of salads, I admit I don’t take the time to prepare and enjoy a salad a meal very often. So when I saw that Lean Cuisine had launched a new Salad Additions line to their frozen foods, I fell for the marketing hook, line and sinker. And I was disappointed.
The toppings yielded less than 1 cup of total topping, with the chicken portion equaling only 4 Tablespoons. Certainly not enough to turn a salad into a meal.
Not to mention I was a little less than excited about the long list of ingredients and odd barley or rice shaped bits in with the vegetables. As I was contemplating even eating it – the first thing that popped into my head was, “I can make this, and make it healthier and certainly tastier!” And so the Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad Topper was created!
Lastly – COST!! The Lean Cuisine Salad Additions was $2.89 at my local grocer. The ingredients and storage bags for the Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad Topper was less than $2.25 but yielded more than double the amount of ingredients. Wow!