This post is sponsored by our partnership with Festival Foods.

When it comes to making quick and easy meals for busy weeknight dinners and lunches, picking fresh ingredients is always a winning choice!

Our palatable Chicken Chipotle Salad is full of healthy ingredients and includes good protein sources in chicken and black beans.

A Chopped Salad for Lunch or Dinner

This delectable salad is both delicious and filling. And, while you don't have to line the ingredients up in pretty pretty rows atop a bed of Romaine lettuce like we did, it certainly makes for a pretty presentation.

It's easy to make this scale the size of this salad to your needs. We used fresh chicken, but if you want to make a smaller portion, you can always use frozen chicken and just take out a strip or two of chicken breast to meet your needs.

Additionally, any leftover canned black beans and corn are easy to save and use for another recipe like Taco Soup. For our salad, we used half a can of both black beans and corn.

Make sure to save the leftover beans and corn in a refrigerator safe container and don't store them in the can.

How to Make Chopped Chicken Chipotle Salad

Making chopped salad is easy enough, and the only semi-complicated part of making our Chopped Chicken Chipotle Salad is cooking the chicken and making the dressing.

Where to Find Fresh Local Ingredients

If you're looking for a time-saver, you can always use pre-cooked chicken from the deli meats section of the grocery store. Personally, I prefer fresh chicken from the meat department at Festival Foods.

One of the things that takes this salad from good to great is fresh produce.

We always look for the absolute freshest produce possible and are lucky to be able to shop at a grocery store that prides itself on providing local ingredients.

Grilled Chicken Salad

This amazing salad recipe is SO good!

While the salad is definitely enough to enjoy on its own, it is also nice to pair alongside one of our favorite soup recipes. We're pretty partial to Zuppa Toscana, Roasted Tomato Soup, and Homemade Ham and Potato Soup.

7 Layer Salad - Chopped Salad at It's Finest

We love a good chopped salad. It's a simple recipe yet so pleasing to both the taste buds and the waistline.

Cilantro and the chipotle dressing really bring the flavors of the salad together. Each and every bite are totally delicious.

Add a bit of salt and pepper to taste to finish.

Chopped Salad Restaurant Quality

You can easily make a quality restaurant style chopped salad at home. You don't even have to be a pro in the kitchen to do it!

Everyone has to start somewhere when it comes to learning how to cook, and this salad is a great place to start.

It's simple to toss a salad, and with this recipe, we're adding in a couple simple cooking techniques to bring it all together.

Chopped Chicken Salad Recipe

The first technique is grilling or cooking the chicken. You can do this a few different ways, and each will come away with it's own unique flavor.

First, and the option we chose for cooking the chicken we used in this salad, is to heat a tablespoon of olive olive in a small skillet on the stove top.

We added a couple small strips of raw chicken breast and cooked until done, flipping just once during cooking. Since we added seasoning to the entire salad, we opted not to season the chicken during this step, although you certainly could add your choice of seasoning for additional flavor in the salad.

The second way to cook the chicken would be to cook it out on the grill. This is ideal if you are preparing the salad for a lunch the next day and plan to grill out for dinner.

We think of this as taking care of dinner prep for two meals at one time. Thinking ahead is always a good thing!

The third way we recommend cooking chicken for this Chopped Chicken Salad recipe is cooking it on a George Foreman Grill or something similar.

We do this now and again (see our Grilled Blackened Chicken) and it always sears in the natural flavors of the chicken and the result is a delicious and tender chicken.

How to Make Chipotle Dressing for Salad

Chipotle dressing is easy to whip up. It seriously takes less than 5 minutes, from scratch.

The ingredients needed for the dressing are red wine vinegar, honey, olive oil, salt and pepper, garlic and of course those phenomenally flavored chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.

To mix up the dressing, we simply toss all the ingredients together into a food processor or blender and mix a liquid consistency.

Chipotle Salad Dressing

If you don't have five minutes to spare to throw together this delicious homemade Chipotle Salad Dressing, you can always buy a bottle of Chipotle salad dressing at the store.

It's not the same as homemade, but it can work in a crunch.

However, we highly suggest you go all out and make salad dressing from scratch. The flavor is SO worth it.

We love this easy Chopped Chicken Chipotle Salad for an easy weeknight meal and a delicious meal to pack in a school lunch or bring to work.

Recipe