Chicken salad bruschetta

by Earthwalker | Sep 21, 2010 | Columns, Featured, High Desert Healing | 0 comments

If you’re Italian, you might not agree with me calling this dish a bruschetta. Typically, bruschetta refers to a grilled bread appetizer from central Italy that is rubbed with garlic and topped with extra-virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and other local ingredients. Outside of Italy, it’s common to see chopped tomato, basil, onion, and mozzarella on bruschetta. I use the term liberally – basically, anything aside from butter and jam on my toast constitutes bruschetta. With my very limited ingredient palette and severely restricted diet due to extensive food intolerances, it helps for me to dress up my food with language when I can’t dress it up with too much else.

This is one of my favorite quick meals to eat when I’m in the mood for toast but want a meal with substance. I was using delicious gluten free amaranth bread for toast from the now defunct Francis Simun Bakery in Dallas when I took these photos. Now I am using Food for Life’s yeast-, wheat-, and gluten-free Multi Seed Rice Bread.

I slow cooked the chicken in my crockpot for three and a half hours on high, in a bed of onion, celery, carrot, olive oil, sea salt and black peppercorns. (Before cooking the chicken, I soak it in a bowl of water with a few handfuls of sea salt for about 30 minutes to kill bacteria and tenderize it.)

As always, all ingredients are organic and fresh. You can use any variation of your favorite salad ingredients. I like to include onion or scallions for a nice bite, balanced by the creaminess of avocado and a burst of flavor from ripe cherry tomatoes. You can also make this without the chicken for a lighter, but just as delicious, snack. Be prepared – this can be a messy dish to eat (my favorite kind!).

ingredients
3-4 slices of your favorite bread, toasted
cooked chicken pieces
mixed lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, scallions
optional: sea salt, freshly ground pepper, gomasio or other seasonings, to taste

directions

Toast bread to desired darkness.
Place chicken pieces on top of toast. You can eat the chicken cold or warm it up for a nice contrast with the cold salad ingredients.
Cover with chopped lettuce, avocado, scallions, and tomatoes and add seasonings as desired.

Peace and greens, Julie

Author

Earthwalker

Earthwalker is the username that PT founder Julie Genser created for her online interactions so many years ago when first creating Planet Thrive.

Julie's (Earthwalker's) life was derailed over twenty years ago when she had a very large organic mercury exposure after she naively used a mouth thermometer to measure the temperature of just-boiled milk while making her very first pizza at home. The mercury instantly expanded into a gas form and exploded out the back of the thermometer right into her face. Unaware that mercury was the third most neurotoxic element on Earth, Julie had no idea she had just received a very high dose of a poisonous substance.

A series of subsequent toxic exposures over the next few years -- to smoke from two fires (including 9/11), toxic mold, lyme disease, and chemical injuries -- caused catastrophic damage to her health. While figuring out how to survive day-to-day, and often minute-to-minute, she created Planet Thrive to help others avoid some of the misdiagnoses and struggles she had experienced.

She has clawed her way over many health mountains to get to where she is today. She is excited to bring the latest iteration of Planet Thrive to the chronic illness community.

In 2019, Julie published her very first cookbook e-book called Low Lectin Lunches (+ Dinners, Too!) after discovering how a low lectin, gluten free diet was helping manage her chronic fascia/muscle pain.
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