Southwestern Chicken Salad

For this swap, I had the Southwestern Chicken Salad from the So Tasty So Yummy blog.  I love main dish salads, so I was excited to try this one, especially since I had never made my own salad dressing before.

I made a few modifications to the recipe.  It is a beautiful week here in Wyoming, so I didn't want to turn on the oven.  I marinated the chicken in the spices and some orange juice so that it wouldn't dry out on the grill.  I warmed up the corn and the beans with lime juice instead of olive oil to give it even more of that lime taste.

I loved this dish.  I had a lot of fun making the salad dressing and think that I'm going to attempt making the majority of our salad dressings from now on.  The salad dressing was a little overpowered by the cilantro, so next time I think I'll use less cilantro, but still the salad dressing was a great compliment to the freshness of the salad.

The tortillas added that nice and crispy texture to contrast the tomatoes, avocados.  The salads got kind of large, so I only fried one tortilla instead of two.  But we munched on the strips until the chicken was done grilling, so maybe two would have been better.

The salad was great.  It was nice and fresh yet there was enough stuff to fill me up and satisfy me until breakfast the next morning.  I think that grilling the chicken gave it a boost in flavor that you obviously wouldn't get with baking it, but I think that baking it would work as well too.  I would definitely make this salad again.