Put some chicken tenders in a pan and add Mrs. Dash Southwestern Chipolte marinade. Mrs. Dash is low salt, low sugar, no MSG, which isn’t that important to me by itself, but it leaves the sauce with a light, natural taste–not heavy with high-powered flavorings like corn syrup and salt. A lot of other barbecue sauces taste like ketchup on steroids.

Even frozen chicken tenders will cook pretty nicely left over medium to medium low heat. They do cook very fast once the ice is thawed out of them, so don’t run off and wander around the internet.

Rinse maybe 5 leaves of nice green lettuce–Romaine, or something similar. If you lay the leaves on top of each other, roll them up along the length and then slice across the rib, the section of rib in each slice gives it some shape and puts more texture in the salad then tearing the leaves gives you.

After I sliced the lettuce I felt like I should grind some black pepper over it, which I don’t think I’ve done before. I like doing these salads because usually something occurs to me that I haven’t tried.

Then I sliced an apple over it, cut one of the chicken tenders, and added some low fat cottage cheese.

Overall a very nice salad. You get a great medley of textures between the lettuce and apple versus the chicken and cottage cheese. The marinade is fruity and peppery, which ties in with the apple and the touch of pepper in the lettuce. Cottage cheese relieve the roughage of the apple and lettuce and cools off the marinade a bit… not that it needed cooling off in such a small dose.

It’s short on carbs and needs to be served with an extremely fresh Italian or French bread, but I have to really focus my menu around bread to use up fresh-baked bread before it goes bad and I never feel like going to the store just for a loaf of bread.