Chicken salad with tarragon, homemade mayo and grapes

 

A good picnic is the sum of its parts, and sometimes the whole is better than the individual parts.

Today's was hard to go wrong, with soaring eagles overhead, fair weather and a passable picnic packed into the saddlebags on the bike. I might have managed a closer shot of the eagle, above, but I had left the longer lens at home to make room for the footed acrylic glasses in the camera bag. Clearly, food always outweighs photography for me.

This recipe comes from Alana Chernila, whose book includes a chapter entitled "Eat Outside," which I totally get behind. She includes this recipe after her descriptions of elaborate feasts remembered and reimagined from Tanglewood, where they know how to properly picnic. Like me, they realize that it isn't a proper picnic without a cloth tablecloth, although given today's setting I went for the more casual floral variety, suitably heavy to stay put on the windswept bluff.




Chicken salad with grapes
From "The Homemade Kitchen" by Alana Chernila

Ingredients
5 cups cooked chicken
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon water
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup grapeseed oil
2 tablespoons plain yogurt
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon leaves
5 chives, finely snipped
3/4 cup seedless red grapes
1 cup celery diced
1/2 cup pecans, toasted and chopped
Lettuce for lining plate

Method
Toss chicken with lemon juice and set aside.

Combine egg yolk, water and mustard. (You can use pasteurized eggs if you're concerned about your raw eggs.) Combine oils and whisk into egg yolk mixture, adding in a fine stream. When it's emulsified, add yogurt and salt.

Mix chicken with dressing, herbs, grapes, celery, pecans and some ground pepper. Taste and season with salt if needed. Serve on a bed of lettuce

Rating: Fine enough, but oddly despite featuring homemade mayo, it wasn't sublime. I've actually made a better version of this from a Rachael Ray recipe, of all things. So not bad, but it didn't knock it out of Spring Lake Park.

Also on the menu: Asian coleslaw (6 cups cabbage/carrot mix, 1/4 cup rice wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro and 2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil), cantaloupe wedges, some homemade pickles, and chocolate cupcakes I found in the freezer. So all in all, a perfectly fine picnic.