EASY and DELICIOUS Chicken Salad | Light and healthy, so flavorful! 🍋

Hi everybody, welcome back to Marie's Kitchen. I'm so glad you're here. Spring is officially here. As soon as this season hits, I start craving something light and healthy and crunchy. And this lemon tarragon chicken salad is exactly that. It is so delicious and so easy to make. Great one to make on a Sunday and eat throughout the week. Great one to send in lunches or have for an easy dinner. Also packs up great for a picnic at the pool. So I really think you're gonna love this one. Let's get started. All right, first step, we're gonna cook the chicken. And we are gonna cook it in the Instant Pot. If you don't have an Instant Pot, you can also do this in a slow cooker. You can bake the chicken. You can buy the chicken already shredded. So lots of options depending on what you have time for. But I do wanna show you how to cook it in the Instant Pot because that is one of my favorite uses for this gadget. So this is a six quart Instant Pot. It's one of the newer versions. It's a little bit quieter, which is really nice. I did have the eight quart version, but it was too big. I do not recommend it unless you're cooking for a really, really big family. This is plenty big and obviously takes up some space. So first thing we're gonna do is take our chicken breast. We're using two to three chicken breasts, about a pound to a pound and a third. And just gonna cut that open with my fork here. And then I just pop out the chicken, pop it right into the Instant Pot. And this is going into the inner pot of the Instant Pot. You're not putting it directly onto the bottom of the pot. So this is the Instant Pot inner pot. And drop that in, put your chicken in, and now we're gonna add some water, lemon juice, and salt. Now what we'll do is just cover the chicken with some water and then we're gonna add two tablespoons fresh lemon juice. And then we'll need one more tablespoon for the chicken salad, so we'll set that aside. Now we'll sprinkle some salt in there. You can add some pepper if you like. Now if you've never used an Instant Pot, I will walk you through step by step. What we're gonna do, you can see it says ready. It's plugged in and the lid is locked in place and the steam release is on shut. Now what we'll do is put pressure cook, so that's what we're gonna do. And then you have a menu of things you can choose. And the way you choose them is to scroll through, like this, back or forward. So we're gonna scroll to chicken. And I have my chicken set at six minutes because that's what I like to use for this. If it says 10 minutes on your chicken setting, you can reduce that to six. And then you push it again, okay, and we're ready to go. So we're gonna push start. Now it's preheating. Although it only cooks for six minutes, it is gonna take some time to heat and build up that pressure. So it takes more like 10 to 15 minutes. So we'll set this aside while that cooks and then in the meantime, cut our vegetables. All right, first step, let's cut some celery. I love celery in chicken salad. My daughter does not, but I put it in anyway and I cut it up really small and she doesn't mind it. So that's what I recommend if you're not a big fan of celery. What you can do is just cut down the center to make it into really small pieces. Cut down the center like that. And then we'll cut these stalks into really small pieces. Nice and thin. And of course, if you love big pieces of celery in your chicken salad, you can just ignore everything I just said. Okay, now we can grab our tarragon. And fresh tarragon really is essential for this. If you don't have tarragon, I'd recommend something like possibly basil or dill, but there's just something really delicious about lemon and tarragon. Tarragon has a thick stem in the center, so you do wanna just pull off the leaves. And this is something that we've grown at home in a pot on our little herb table, but the only problem is I never have enough because I use it so much. It's one of my favorite herbs in the summer and spring and I use it so much that I need quite a bit. So I end up buying it from the store in addition to what I have at home. You're gonna want about a tablespoon. You could do a little more if you like. And then we'll mince up our herbs. Bring it together in a little pile and then just run the knife through it like this. Gather it back up into a pile. Run the knife through it again. Here we go. There's our tarragon. Next up is some sweetened dried cranberries or craisins. I love these in chicken salad. I like them even better than grapes. I know a lot of people put grapes in chicken salad, so that's an option if that's something you prefer. I like the dried cranberries because it keeps better for several days rather than the grapes can get a little squishy. And plus I love the little pop of color that the cranberries add. They're nice, tangy, sweet flavor to go along with the chicken and the lemon and the tarragon. Let me know in the comments what else y'all would like to see in spring, maybe egg salad or salad nicoise or who knows. Whatever you wanna see in spring, spring side dishes, spring desserts, just let me know in the comments. I would love to hear from you. All right, now we're moving right along. We're gonna take 1 1⁄2 cup of Greek yogurt. You can go anywhere from 1 1⁄2 to 3⁄4 cup depending how kind of creamy you like it. This is my favorite brand of Greek yogurt. The brand is Greek Gods and I do get the full fat version. You could get the fat-free if you prefer. It's got great flavor, not too tangy, really great texture. So I use it a lot in things that require mayonnaise. In place of all mayonnaise, I like to use about half Greek yogurt and half mayonnaise. For the mayonnaise, we're gonna use about two tablespoons. And you don't have to be real precise about this. Now we are just about done. We're waiting on our chicken. And then other than that, we're just going to add our tarragon. Then we can add our dried cranberries and our celery. And finally, we'll add one tablespoon lemon juice and a nice pinch of salt. For serving the chicken salad, there's a lot of options. You can put it in like a hoagie roll like this. This is how my daughter loves it. Or just some nice sourdough or another bread, also delicious. Or if you want something lower carb, you can make a lettuce wrap. And when I make lettuce wraps, my favorite lettuce to use is a bib or butter lettuce. It has a different name, same lettuce. And it usually comes in this living butter lettuce package. You can see the dirt and the roots are all there on the bottom. So you're actually picking the leaves off the plant. So it's very fresh. And what I love about butter lettuce is that it's very tender. And also comes off in this great shape, which is just right for adding chicken salad or tuna salad or beef or whatever you wanna make. And we'll just wash these leaves individually. Pick off a few of these. It sounds like our chicken is done. So we'll set this aside and release the pressure from the Instant Pot. And if you can see that, it says zero, which means it's been cooking for six minutes and it's now done. And it says do not open lid. And it's on the flashing at keep warm. So that's what all this means. Now what we're gonna do is release the steam. And it's a little easier with the newer version of the Instant Pot. My old version would shoot steam everywhere and it was really loud. But the newer version, it's kinda nice. It still comes out, but it's a lot quieter and not quite as in your face. So I'm gonna go ahead and move this button here on the top down to release the steam. You can hear that. Hoo, that's hot right there. Okay, that steam's very hot. So, we learn something new every day. Now right here it's kinda beeping at me and it's saying okay to open lid and it's still on keep warm. So what I like to do is just go ahead and unplug the Instant Pot because we're done with it. No more cooking going on. It's unplugged and the steam's released. So now we can carefully open the lid. And you usually wanna open the lid away from you so you don't get all that steam in your face. I'll set this down. And just pop out our chicken breasts. Now at this point, if you like diced chicken in your chicken salad, feel free to do that. Let it cool a bit and then go ahead and dice it. I prefer it shredded. I find it's just really nice. So you can take two forks and shred it. You can wait till it cools and shred it with your fingers. Or another great way to shred chicken is to put it in your KitchenAid stand mixer. That is gonna shred it itself. That's really my favorite way to do it, but it is using another gadget, so I don't always do that. Coco is gonna come over here as soon as she smells the chicken. She loves it when I make chicken salad because she knows she might get a bite. Yes, you do, don't you? Yes, you do. You're a good girl. Yes, you are. She smells that good chicken. Another way to shred chicken is to use a potato masher. It actually works. So you just mash it like this and it'll start to break up into pieces. Let's see if I can find a piece for her. Yes, I'll give you a piece. Come here. Oh, it's gonna be hot, girl. Let me wait till it's, let me cool it off. Now, in case you do have a stand mixer, I'll show you real quick how to shred the chicken using this. We're just gonna put the paddle attachment on and then add our chicken breast right to the bowl. And then just put that on kind of a low speed. Lock it into place so it's not bumping around and then we'll just let that break it up. That looks great. I'm gonna show you how that looks. There we go. Nicely shredded chicken. Did you know you could use your KitchenAid stand mixer for shredding chicken? Let me know in the comments. All right, Coco Puff, you earned your chicken. Come here, girl. Can you say hi? Yes, who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? That's a good girl. Now we'll add our shredded chicken to the other ingredients and give that a stir. And it's just easy as that. Now we'll give it a taste and see if it needs a little extra salt or a little extra lemon. Mm, delicious. Might add a tiny bit more salt, but it's really just right. Ah, so flavorful and light. And then for serving, we'll take our butter lettuce leaves that we washed here. And then those you just wanna pat dry. They're kinda delicate and tender, so just pat dry with a paper towel. And then what you could do is just take some of this nice warm chicken salad, pop that into one of your lettuce leaves. And of course, if you love nuts, some walnuts on here or some pecans mixed in is also delicious. Just wrap that up. And mm, love this. Mm, it was just in time for lunch. Thanks so much for joining us on Marie's Kitchen. Today we made this easy and delicious lemon tarragon chicken salad in the Instant Pot. It was so quick and easy, about 30 minutes total. I can't wait for you to try this one. For the recipe, hop over to my website marieseba.com. There's no pop-ups, there's no ads. It's just a hopefully easy to navigate website with recipes that are easy to print. And if you have any trouble printing, just send me an email and let me know and I'll get that fixed as soon as I can. If you like this video, be sure to give us a thumbs up. It means so much to me and also to YouTube. And be sure to subscribe. I've got lots more videos coming up with easy recipes just like this and I don't want you to miss any of them. My goal is to give you some really easy recipes that turn out great every time so you can build some confidence in the kitchen and feel really inspired to share good food with people that you love. From my kitchen to yours, thank you.