A chicken salad mixed with shredded lettuce, sliced green onion, chopped tomato, shredded cheese, chopped pecan and dressed with mayonnaise, pictured stuffed in a toasted pita.

Patsy's Cheesy Chicken Salad

I love a good chicken salad recipe and occasionally I enjoy adding lettuce and tomato to my chicken salad sandwiches, but it had never occurred to me to include them in my chicken salad!

Enter me browsing through some of my old cookbooks and seeing this recipe in the cookbook Bless Your Heart: Saving the World One Covered Dish at a Time (#ad), and y'all, it also adds in the unusual ingredient of shredded cheese, so I knew I needed to give it a try!

My homemade take on the viral TikTok fast food salad hack, made with a kale, cabbage and lettuce base, dressed with a honey mustard vinaigrette and topped with honey and hot sauce tossed crispy chicken tenders.

Cabbage and Kale Chicken Strip Salad

If you're not a big fan of kale, stay tuned y'all. I think you'll love this, I really do! Read on.

The inspiration for this salad came from a video that passed my timeline on social media one day.

The gal shooting the video was sitting in her car in the parking lot of Chick-fil-A with a drive through order. The hack was with their Kale Crunch Salad and an add on 3-piece chicken strip meal which she tossed in the box with a packet of buffalo sauce and honey. She tore the strips with her fingers and topped her salad with them.

I thought it sounded good and since I don't have a Chick-Fil-A nearby, I got one of those well "I can make that at home" vibes y'all.

A mixed garden salad made with romaine and iceberg lettuces, fresh parsley, Romano and bleu cheeses, lot of freshly cracked black pepper and a tangy, lemon-garlic vinaigrette.

Sensation Salad

This salad is a slight revision of the well-loved salad found in the Junior League of Baton Rouge's River Roads Recipes II cookbook.

While it became more widely known across Louisiana and her sister states from the cookbook, it actually originated as a creation of a now closed, Baton Rouge restaurant called Bob and Jake's, and soon took on a viral life of its own among other local area restaurants.

 

A layered salad made with thick cut bacon, crunchy iceberg lettuce, summer ripened fresh red tomatoes and substantial and chunky croutons finished with a homemade Ranch dressing.

BLT Salad

Pasta salads aside (which I adore), I love bringing a fresh garden salad to an event, potluck or cookout. It sort of balances out what seems to always be an overabundance of meats.

In the summer, that is most likely some kind of a cucumber salad or a layered salad, and this BLT salad falls right into that category. I mean, who doesn't love a BLT sandwich to begin with, but turn those flavors into a salad and it's really a hit!

 

Layered with iceberg lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, red onion, bacon and Parmesan cheese, and dressed with a vinegar and mayonnaise, mustard dressing. Shown here with my Southern Style Green Beans and Ground Beef Mac and Cheese casserole.

Next Day Salad

I seem to be on a roll here with salads! Well, it is that time of the year I suppose and I sure hope that you can bear one more, because it's a good one.

We have a family owned market (now catering and buffet restaurant) here on the Coast called Broome's Grocery. They've always been a favorite store for locals - I can remember when they were one of the very few stores to open shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

There wasn't any electricity, but they opened to sell bread and snacks and whatever non-perishables they had left on the shelf. We were all standing in the line, hot, sweaty, wore out and frankly, a little dirty from the cleanup process, none of us having water to bathe for days already, but so grateful to be able to pick up a few familiar things to eat after those first days.

I tell you what... you don't know how much you miss having running water and electricity until you don't have it anymore.

A very simple salad made with cooked shrimp, iceberg lettuce, fresh tomatoes and dressed with mayonnaise.

Shrimp and Iceberg Lettuce Salad

This is my version of what my mother and father-in-law and The Cajun call shrimp salad and I absolutely love it, even though I struggled with what to call it myself, since when I think of shrimp salad, I think of the shrimp and egg salad I grew up with and love so much.