Southwestern Salad with Homemade Pesto Ranch

I am so excited to share with you the salad we tried from a recipe in Shape Magazine last night! This was super delicious, and my meat loving, green food avoiding husband even loved it! (Just kidding, he like's veggies and fruits, but meat would be his main choice in a dinner item!)

 We made delicious Pesto Ranch dressing, and switched out a few ingredients, but generally we followed the basic recipe found in the August 2011 Shape Magazine. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the recipe on their website, and for that article all they have posted is one of their other "Fire Up the Grill" recipes (this recipe being called southwester Grilled Chicken Salad with Pesto Ranch Dressing).

Ingredients

For the Dressing (serves 4 salads but we don't use lot of dressing)

1/4 Cup Olive Oil Mayo

1/8 Cup Sour Cream

1/8 Cup Milk

1/8 Cup Pesto

For the Salad

2 4-oz boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/2 T Garlic
1/4 Cup Teriyaki
1/3 Can of Corn, Drained
1 Chopped Romaine Lettuce
1 Avocado, Diced
1/2 of a Small Red Onion, Diced
1 1/2 Stalks Celery, Diced...I ate one 1/2 w/ PB :)
1/4 C Black Beans, Rinsed and Drained
1/2 Cup Roasted Pine Nuts
1/2 Cup Feta Cheese

To make your dressing, just measure and stir! Then you should cover and refrigerate this for at least 25 minutes to let the flavor saturate.

Then you need to season the chicken. We did ours with garlic and teriyaki and let it soak up flavor for about 30 minutes before putting it on the stove top to cook.

We heated up our corn with a little butter on the stove top until it got a little crispy. If you are doing this at home, I recommend grilling the chicken and a corn on the cob, but we didn't want to grill so we used canned corn and cooked all of it on the stovetop.

While all of this is cooking up, you can start preparing your salad by mixing the romaine with the avocado, onion, celery and beans.

Then you will want to roast of some nuts, we used pine nuts and roasted them on the stove top until they were golden.

Grab you salad mix, stir in the chicken, the corn, the pine nuts, and top it off with your cheese of choice, we used Feta!

Enjoy!