Chicken salad:  

​good on bread, fabulous in lettuce wraps, also good on slices of zucchini

I’m going to type this up in two parts: first, the basic part of the actual chicken salad and, second, a treatise on how I prep the chicken.  Suffice it to say, you can make this salad with any chicken you have laying around, like leftovers from a barbecue or a roast.  But if you prep the chicken the way I do, you also get chicken broth!  Which you can then use for chicken noodle soup, chicken rice soup, or any of the other myriad uses of chicken broth.

Part 1: Chicken Salad
Ingredients:
— chicken meat, chopped or shredded
— celery stalks, finely minced
— fresh tarragon, finely minced
— mayo
— sliced almonds
— a pinch of salt
Proportions should be along these lines (who measures?)
For half a chicken, use 
— 3 stalks of celery, 
— one small bag of sliced almonds, 
— one stalk of tarragon (typically that’s how they package it down here)
— about 1 cup of mayo (more if you need more holding power)

I use Duke’s Mayo (https://www.dukesmayo.com/product/real-mayonnaise/) because it is very simple and does not contain sugar or any sweetener.  Surprisingly, some commercial mayos do have sweeteners.  Like all real mayos, it does contain eggs.  Full ingredient list:  "soybean oil, eggs, water, distilled and cider vinegar, salt, oleoresin paprika, natural flavors, calcium disodium EDTA added to protect flavor."

You could probably also use a plain yogurt that has been drained for a couple of hours (or a thick greek yogurt).  I’ve never tried that, but I bet it would be good.

Part 2:  Poached Chicken
Ingredients:
— a chicken, raw
— water
— veggies
      — 2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped
      — 2 carrots, roughly chopped
      — 1 onion, roughly chopped
      — 2 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
— one package of poultry herbs
    — a sprig of rosemary
    — couple sprigs of thyme
    — a few sage leaves
— bay leaf or two
— 1 teaspoon of salt

Use a very large pot with a tight lid (I use a Le Creuset dutch oven, made of enamel coated cast iron, which is very heavy but which can be put in the oven, freeing up space on the stove top if needed).  The pot obviously needs to be large enough to hold all the veggies and the chicken in a water bath.

Step 1:  Assemble

• Place all the ingredients in the pot.  Put the veggies and herbs in first, then add the chicken on top of them.  The chicken will float a little, which is fine.  
• Add water until the level comes up to halfway up the chicken (or so).  It’s not necessary to be precise.  You can actually cover the chicken entirely, but that is a little tricky to manage.

Step 2:  Boil the Chicken

• Put the lid on the pot and bring to a boil.  When the steam is escaping at the edges, turn the heat down to low and continue cooking for about 30 minutes.  
• At the 30 minute point, open the pot and flip the chicken over.  This is tricky, so be careful.  You’ll want to use a carving fork to stabilize the chicken during the turning process.
• Cover it back up and cook for another 30 minutes.  At this point, the internal temp of the chicken should be about 190 F (88 C).  Again, it is not necessary to be precise.  You want the chicken to be fully done so that it is relatively easy to get the meat off the bone, but not falling apart done.  
• If you don’t have a temperature probe, simply look at the chicken: if the legs move freely and the skin has begun to fall off the meat, it’s ready to be taken out of its bath.

Step 3:  Harvest the Yummy Stuff

• Take the chicken out of the bath and into a very large bowl.  Lots of juice is going to come out and you want to catch all that good stuff.
• Leave the broth simmering while you get the good meat.
• Carefully (cause that chicken is HOT!), use a knife and some sort of grabbing utensil (fork, tongs, etc) to get the breast and thigh meat from the chicken.  Move that meat as you harvest it into a separate bowl.  
• After you get the good meat off, put the skins, bones, and twiddly bits back into the broth.  Cover that up and let it cook for another hour: this will be your chicken soup.

Step 4:  Last steps

• Cover the chicken meat and place in the fridge to chill down.  Once it is cold, you can make the chicken salad.
• After the broth has boiled for the second hour, strain it.  I use a pasta cooker for this (one of those pots with the insert that has all the holes that you boil noodles in and then you can simply lift out the cooked noodles).  I pour the chicken broth into the pasta pot and then lift out the bones, skin, and used up veggies.  This can be discarded once it is cool enough to not melt your trash bags. 
• There will be left over bits of veggies and herbs in the broth.  If you want something clearer, you can do a second strain through cheesecloth.  But it’s pretty yummy just by itself.