Things have been busy around here! We are sharing our last recipe from edamame week a bit late. We will have our vegetable for this week (rumored to be broccoli) in a day or two.

We love it when our readers leave us comments about our blog posts! Grandpa Perry told us in a comment that he loves the edamame in Panera’s Thai Chicken Salad. This comment inspired us to look for a similar recipe to give edamame one more try. We found the recipe for Lighter Chinese Chicken Salad at Gimme Some Oven. (I love this blog’s name!)

Lucie and Josie were happy to shell the edamame. This time they pretended that the pods were caterpillars that turned into butterflies as they shelled. This reduced their efficiency, but increased their level of fun.

We marinated two chicken breasts in a mixture 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and 3 tablespoons of rice wine vinegar for about 15 minutes before grilling them on our griddler.

Next we made the dressing according to the recipe, leaving out the optional sriracha chile sauce. The dressing smelled so good! I love the smell of anything that includes fresh grated ginger. Lucie and Josie were pretty skeptical about a third round of edamame tasting, but when I let them sample this dressing with a piece of carrot, they became a bit more optimistic.

Now for the salad. We did not have romaine lettuce, as the recipe calls for, but we did have bagged baby spinach, so that it what we used in its place. I love it when my veggies come pre-shredded, chopped or otherwise prepared!

We combined the veggies, dressing, almonds and chow mein noodles in a bowl. Josie was impressed with the colors of this salad. She said it reminded her of fall.

Finally, we sliced our chicken breasts and topped our salads with them.

What would the kids think? They are not huge fans of salad and edamame has not made it to our list of favorite veggies, so I was prepared for the worst.

Theo could not wait to dig in.

He gave the salad two thumbs up. He ate around most of the edamame, but I’m pretty sure he ate a few by accident. He ate all of the chicken and a good portion of the other ingredients.

Josie said….

What?!? Two thumbs to the side! That is a pretty good rating from her, considering this is a salad. She ate all of the chicken and she liked the carrots and red cabbage. She still did not like the edamame.

Lucie thought the whole salad was great and ate everything. I agree with her. It was fantastic! We decided we felt like we were eating at a restaurant. I think the taste of edamame might be growing on me. Surprisingly, we enjoyed the red cabbage in this recipe. I normally pick all the red cabbage out of salads, so this was a big change for me. I was also surprised to see that the kids ate it.

We have two important ideas from edamame week  to share with you. First, if you do not like a vegetable, keep trying it in different ways. It may grow on you! Second, edamame is a great way to distract kids. They focus on picking it our of their meal and eat all the other vegetables on their plate instead. I think I will call this the “decoy vegetable” trick. 😉 I wonder what that book I’m wanting to read will say about this kind of vegetable trickery?

Thanks for visiting,

Jen

P.S.

A few words from Lucie:

I really liked the new recipe we tried. I liked the edamame in it too. My favorite part of this recipe was the dressing. I was surprised that I liked it. I even asked Mama to save the leftovers for me! Maybe edamame isn’t so bad after all.