How to Make Turkey Salad

Ask anyone what the best thing about leftover turkey after Thanksgiving is and they'll tell you the sandwiches that can be made. Ask anyone what the worst thing is and they'll tell you it's the sandwiches that can be made. Turkey is a wonderful, versatile bird. It's great in any form you can cook it, well save for the turkey loaf which is some kind of crime against nature and everything holy and good in the world. Still, leftover turkey is boring after the third cold turkey sandwich you eat. What to do with the rest? Well, you've heard of chicken salad right? Well, turkey is now very much in that same department.

The biggest thing to the turkey sandwich is the turkey. You want to make sure you use all white meat. Dark meat is too greasy and just doesn't make for a good addition to the turkey salad. Now when you're choosing the leftover white meat that you have, you want to make sure it has absolutely no little strips of fat on it, which is usually found around the skin. Why? Because when you will be eating your turkey salad sandwich, you're not going to want to bite into a piece of fat. So clean the fat off. Once that is done, just cube the turkey as small as possible.

Now the next thing you're going to want to do is season the turkey, this isn't so much for the turkey itself, but for the taste of the salad later. This would also be a good time to put any other ingredients you would like in your turkey salad. Now I can't tell you how to do yours, but I can tell you how I do mine. I usually you just plain pepper and some sea salt for the flavoring part. Then I use diced celery, onion, parsley flakes and pimentos. Now I know the "in" thing to do with chicken salad is to throw nuts and grapes in with it, but please, that's just weird. But if you insist on throwing a fruit in with it, use dried cranberries. Those I actually love and I do put them in my turkey salad, make sure they're the dried cranberries though, don't use that jellied cranberry sauce that uninventive people like to use, it wouldn't come out right.

Now you're looking at a bowl full of ingredients and you're probably thinking, "doesn't this need mayonaisse or something?" Well, this is the step where you put the mayonaisse in. If you're like me, you like Miracle Whip. Don't ask me why I like it? It's just part of being me. So how much do you put in? Well, you don't want it runny, so a little under a half a cup would be just perfect. You stir all that together then and you put it in the fridge to chill, because it only tastes good chilled.

Can you put other things inside the turkey salad? Can you put chicken into the turkey salad? Well the answer to the first question is yes, you can put any other kind of ingredient into the turkey salad, but leave the bloody grapes and nuts out, it's not cool. The answer to the chicken question is a resounding no; this is a turkey salad, not a chicken salad. You want chicken in it, then make a chicken salad. Let the turkey do it's stuff on it's own.