52 Weeks of Cooking: Chipotle Chicken Taco Salad

I am an avid reader of the website popsugar.com! Within popsugar there are a bunch of different sections and one of the sections is yumsugar and is all about food and recipes. The writer on yumsugar has been doing this 52 weeks of baking and every week she posts about what she baked, how easy it was to make, was it good, etc. I really enjoying reading those posts and was thinking of copying the idea of doing 52 weeks of baking. Then I realized that Jon probably wouldn't eat anything I baked because he doesn't like sweets (I know - gasp!) and I don't really need to be eating baked goods all week every week so that idea went out the window.

Cooking however I want to do more off. When we lived in Boston I cooked all the time. Moving to NYC, I've found it really is true - people eat ALL the time! Given that most nights I'm getting dinner ready for 1 I'm not uber motivated to cook up elaborate meals. However, I miss cooking tremendously! I've been meaning to start cooking more and I thought that blogging about cooking might help me stick to that goal. Thus, I'm going to do 52 weeks of Cooking and blog about the recipes that I cook.

Wednesday night I had my brother and his girlfriend over for dinner and so I decided this would be the inaugural meal of 52 weeks of Cooking. The point of 52 weeks of Cooking is not only that I cook up a new recipe but that I cook up something that isn't necessarily safe and easy I have to try things that are out of the box for me (mind you they may not seem out of the box for you!) So here it goes....

Chipotle Chicken Taco Salad (this recipe is from the Cooking Light Annual 2007 recipes cook book)

Total time: 35 minutes

Dressing:

2/3 cup light sour cream

1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro

4 teaspoons fresh lime juice

1 tablespoon minced chipotle chile, canned in adobo sauce (I didn't use this because I am adverse to HEAT in my food!)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

Salad:

4 cups shredded romaine lettuce

2 cups chopped roasted skinless, boneless chicken breast (about 2 breast halves)

1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

1/2 cup diced peeled avocado

1/3 cup thinly vertically sliced red onion

1 (15-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 (8 3/4 - ounce) can no-salt added wholekernel corn, rinsed and drained

1. To prepare dressing, combine first 7 ingredients, stirring well

2. To prepare salad, combine lettuce and remaining 6 ingredients in a large bowl. Drizzle dressing over salad, toss gently to coat. Serve immediately. Yield: 4 servings (serving size 2 1/2 cups)

We had tostitos gold tortilla chips on the side to scoop up the bits and pieces of the salad. And we had tinto de veranos (or as my brother calls them, "the poor man's sangria"): 1/2 glass cheap red wine, 1/2 glass orange soda, stir!

I have to say the salad was very good - I even liked the beans and tomatoes! Jon, my brother and his girlfriend all enjoyed the meal! I'd say the first week of 52 weeks of Cooking went well!