“The Dish: Recipe”: Making zucchini and chicken salad

J.M. Hirsch joins “CBS Mornings” with a recipe for zucchini and chicken salad straight from Milan, featured in his new cookbook “Backroads Italy.”

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Now to our series, the dish recipe. It’s a spin-off of our James Beard award-winning series, The Dish, where we focus on just one easy to follow recipe. Today, we are sharing a dish from the new cookbook, Back Roads Italy. Co-authored by Milk’s editorial director, JM Hirs. This recipe for zucchini and chicken salad comes from Milan, and it uses simple ingredients to create a dish with contrasting textures and flavors. [Music] Good morning. I’m JM Hirs, editorial director at Milkre and co-author of our new book, Back Roads Italy. We’re going to make a shaved zucchini and chicken salad with almonds and lemon. The ingredients you need for the dish are allspice, lemon, zucchini, macarona, almonds, celery, rotisserie chicken, and parsley. We’re going to start out by making our very simple but really wonderfully seasoned dressing. So, we’re going to take a little bit of olive oil. Always extra virgin, please. For some spicy warmth, we’ve got some allspice. Going to put in about a/4 teaspoon. Going to throw in a generous pinch of kosher salt. An equally generous pinch of ground black pepper. and a very important ingredient, some lemon zest. Now, we’re going to juice it. We’re going to give it a quick whisk. Perfect. Now, we’re going to set that aside just a moment while we prep the first of our two star ingredients, in this case, zucchini. We’re going to start by trimming off the ends. What we’re going to do is use a vegetable peeler and we’re going to turn these zucchinis into zucchini ribbons by doing it like this. It creates a tremendous amount of surface area and we really want that because it’s an opportunity for the dressing to adhere to a ton of surface area on the zucchini. And you’re going to do this until you get down to the seedy core. You don’t want the seedy core. Now I’m going to add my zucchini ribbons to the bowl with my dresser. The next ingredient is a couple stocks of celery. What we’re doing is cutting our celery what’s called on the bias, which means we’re cutting it at an angle. This creates more surface area for once again all that dressing to cling to. [Music] Now, what I consider a magic ingredient, marona almonds. They’re a higher fat almond than the more common California almonds. And as such, they add a ton of richness as well as crunch to this dish. All you’re looking to do is break them up a little bit so that they’re not monster almonds in your salad. [Music] Now, we can go to the second star ingredient, the chicken. This is just a rotisserie chicken. What we want is about three cups of cooked and shredded chicken meat. We’re going to toss all of this with our dressing in the bottom. We want to make sure everything soaks up that dressing. Now, I’m going to season it just a little bit with some kosher salt and a little bit more black pepper. And then we’re going to resist eating it right away. We’re going to let it sit for about 15 minutes. All right. After about 15 minutes, we’re going to grab some fresh parsley and we’re going to give it a few rough chops. I’m going to sprinkle that. Maybe toss it a little bit. And we’re ready to serve it. My god, this is perfect. It is robust. It’s bright. It’s got so much going on texturally. You’ve got the crunch of the almonds. You get the tender zucchini. You got the crunchy celery. It’s just so much going on. And that bright bright lemon flavor. Again, 15 20 minutes. This is on the table. It is so so good. This looks absolutely delicious. Delicious. It looks It’s a fresh take on chicken salad. But I was asking Vlad during that, are you a raisins in your chicken salad guy? What was your response? Raisins. Who puts raisins in chicken salad? Put raisin in a chicken salad. People do. People put raisins in their chicken salad. I mean, they don’t look like me, but you know. Hey, that’ll do it for us. Stick around for CBS Mornings Plus.