LMCo. Family Recipes: BBQ Chicken Salad

In the Family Recipes & Stories Volume 3, we compiled this little informal field guide of your family recipes and stories from across the USA. From April's Fried Chicken to the Dark Chocolate Cheesecake Skillet Brownies dessert, you're going to love cooking your way through this collection.

Winner, winner, chicken salad dinner! It's your lucky day, because we're sharing Corey Godfrey's BBQ Chicken Salad, a super easy recipe to throw together and the first appetizer to be eaten at a dinner party.

Corey says, "I used to work at a restaurant that did an all you can eat Sunday brunch, and we always had baked chicken thighs left over. So, the next day I'd mix in some white meat chicken with the thighs, dice it all up, and make chicken salad for the lunch special. I used BBQ sauce to cut the mayonnaise and give it a little extra flavor."

• 1 rotisserie chicken, shredded (or any type of chicken you like, just make sure it's seasoned. I like rotisserie from the grocery store because it's usually seasoned well, tender, and you get a good mix of white and dark meat)
• 1/2 cup of mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup BBQ sauce (we recommend our favorite, Killer Hogs BBQ sauce!)
• 1/2 red onion, diced
• 1/2 green pepper, diced
• Black pepper to taste (I like it a lot, it goes well with the sweetness of the BBQ sauce and looks good, too)
• Dashes of hot sauce to taste

Shred the chicken in a big bowl (remember to season with salt and pepper if it's not a store-bought rotisserie bird.) Add all the other ingredients and mix well. It's especially good the next day, after everything has had some time to get together. The beauty of this recipe is that it's super flexible: you can use different colored peppers, leave out the onions, add jalapeños, use more or less BBQ sauce, use grilled or even fried chicken, whatever you like. 

We hope you enjoy this delicious chicken salad recipe. There are dozens of recipes and fun short stories about southern cooking woven throughout the book and it makes the perfect gift to pair with our Volume 1, Volume 2 or our best-selling hymn tea towels.