Pesto Chicken Salad

I've been sick with an awful head cold, so I haven't been able to (a) go grocery shopping in over a week, (b) cook anything new and exciting, & (c) update the few recipes I did try over the past couple weeks on the blog here. I'm going to have to go back and see if I can track down photos, but I have three posts I can remember making recently that need to be cataloged. I guess I'll start with the most recent one first (the one for our dinner this evening) and then back track.

Sooooo, as I mentioned, I am really, ridiculously low on groceries. We even ran out of coffee for goodness sake! That hardly ever happens!!! I think this has been the emptiest my stores have been ever. All I have in the pantry is some dried beans and other snack-y type food for the boy's lunch box treats. My fridge and freezer are also in a similar, sorry state. Sadly, I'm not going to have time to get to the store for at least another day, so I needed to forage for something for us to eat tonight. My first thought was breakfast for dinner. Then I realized that's not gonna happen, since I only have a few, hard-boiled eggs left in the deli drawer. (I think my family would riot if I gave them hard-boiled eggs for dinner.) My next thought was Nutella straight outta the jar for everyone...but then I wouldn't be nominated mother of the year :::snort:::.

(Although, Nutella sounds like a perfectly reasonable dinner idea.)

Me: "Hey kids, grab a spoon...it's Nutella time. Pass the jar this way!"
Family: "Yay, mommy is the coolest mom ever!!!!! Daddy should buy her diamonds!"

(Anyway...that was a total tangent.)

I did have a store-bought partially-devoured roasted chicken leftover, along with one cooked/grilled chicken thigh from last night's meal. The thighs and legs were in tact on the whole chicken, and the separate grilled thigh was a decent size. My bff, Claire mentioned that she was making a pesto chicken salad for dinner one night this week. I thought that would be a pretty clever use for my sparse chicken meat, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a frozen container of store-bought pesto in the waaaaay back of my freezer. Woot! (I didn't know I had it, and I'm happy I went exploring in there. Now I'm in business!!!) I scrounged together a few small celery stalks from the center of the bunch, a half an onion (of the very last onion in the house), and scraped out the final bits of mayo and plain yogurt from their containers. I don't know if I'm going to serve my pesto chicken salad with a singular sliced tomato over salad greens (fingers crossed they are not wilted and gross) or if I'm going to make the hubs stop on the way home for a loaf of bread to tide us over and make sandwiches. Either way, I'm able to pull a meal together with hardly any ingredients and I don't need to serve dried beans or hard-boiled eggs for dinner. Whew! Crisis averted!

Pesto Chicken Salad

Ingredients:
2 cups of cooked, diced chicken (I didn't measure)
1/2 diced onion
1-2 celery stalks, diced finely
1/2 cup of mayo
1/3 cup of Greek non-fat plain yogurt
1 (6 oz.) container of store-bought pesto
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Combine all ingredients into a large bowl and stir to mix thoroughly. Refrigerate until ready to use. Serve on salad greens or as a sandwich with sliced tomatoes on toasted bread.

NOTE: This was easy, inexpensive, and very yummy.