Knock Off

The biggest craving I had while I was pregnant was for salads. I loved all and any salads especially Zuppas BBQ chicken salad. If I could live there and had enough money to eat that salad every day I would. I thought that once little T came I wouldn't want to eat salad anymore, considering I hated them before becoming pregnant (except for cafe rios pork salad). Well I haven't lost my craving for salads which is kinda nice considering I am trying to fit into my old clothes. So I decided to roll with this craving and get creative. For dinner I decided I was going to make this Zuppa salad as best as I could. Honestly it was amazing. I am not even going to pretend to be a creative or good experimental chef. I am a great follow someone else's recipe and take credit for others creativity chef. However I branches out and made my own. Best part about it is how easy and cheap it is. It can also be adapted to whatever you like! Here's what I did and used.

Ingredients
Lettuce
Corn
Black beans
Chicken
Red onion
BBQ sauce
Ranch

I started of cooking my chicken because it has to cool. So I cut up chicken into bite size cubs. Then I placed them in a sauce pan to cook. For taste I added a dash of brown sugar, Hungarian paprika, cayenne pepper, salt, pepper and cinnamon. (The great news is though that you don't need to add any spices if you don't want. The salad at Zuppas doesn't have any and it's still delicious!)
Then I added a little bit of chicken stock (not even enough to cover the chicken) to let the chicken simmer in. I hate dry chicken but am always worried about not cooking it enough, so chicken stock is a great way to get juicy chicken that's fully cooked. Once my chicken is done I put it in a bowl to put in the fridge and cool down. Then I moved on to the rest of the salad.

1/2 cooked chicken

The other half cooled in a bowl

I used 2 different kinds of lettuce because I like a variety and texture to my salad. I used a bag of spinach and a bag of romaine. I combined my lettuce with a small can of corn and black beans. I then chopped up some red onion. I used a ton because I am a freak who loves onions!

Once I finished combing the rest of the salad I pulled out my chicken and added it to the salad. And served it.

Finished Product

 Literally that's all. I placed the ranch dressing and BBQ sauce in the table so that each person could put as much as they wanted. Jake likes a lot of BBQ sauce I like about 1/2 and 1/2. It is literally the easiest salad on the the planet and can adapted so many ways. At Zuppas they add olives and tomatoes but since I hate both I keep them out. They also add tortilla chips but I forgot them at the store. think next time I am going to add some red bell pepper to it because it will give it another crunchy factor and they taste good. The 2 bags of lettuce gives you tons of left overs!!! And it's ridiculously cheap. We spent less than 30 dollars and that included all the fruit we used for a fruit salad (from Costco) and we have enough left overs for about 5 more lunches or dinners. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did!