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summer meal ideas

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Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

July 14, 2023

This easy to make Ranch Chicken Salad will be a healthy grab-and-go lunch to prep for your week!

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Product links in this post are affiliate links. It does not cost you anything, and helps maintain the free information on this site, as well as answer the questions of “what brand do you use?” Please know I never personally recommend any product I wouldn’t use on my own family.

Sweet Summer!

Oh sweet summer! We just about live for our beautiful Lake Michigan beaches, and our sweet little Lake Michigan beach town! If you have been around here very long, you know that I tend to take a bit of a break from writing in the summer to enjoy the girls being home from school, and also to soak in all the sun and beach sand here! I just had to pop in to share a recipe we have had on repeat during these warmer and *busier* months of summer, though, and I can’t wait to hear about how you use it in your home!

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Wait…summer, busier?!

Well just a different kind of busy! Long gone are the days of littles that enjoyed the beach in the early morning only to crash for afternoon naps or a little afternoon downtime. These tweens and teens – boy, oh boy! They love their friend hang out time, and they also tend to be involved in more activities. We even have one that has a little babysitting job this summer! That means mom is in the car playing chauffer (or, I guess since we are in 2023 we can call me an Uber driver?!). And with mom in the car driving the people all over the place, that means sometimes there is less time in the kitchen. When that happens, I have found just a little bit of planning ahead will keep real food that actually counts still on the table without me having to stay up all night preparing food.

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Chicken salad with a twist!

Chicken salad has been on repeat all summer this year, and for good reason! Not only is a cold meal that doesn’t heat up the house, and a great protein source, it also is easy to make big batches up if you do it the right way! I like to use my Instant Pot to make a whole chicken for the meat. This saves me money since whole chickens are less per pound than cuts of chicken, and it makes a lot so we have enough to scoop from for multiple days. I’ll get to the chicken cooking method in a minute, but lets talk about that “twist!” A couple of months ago, a friend of mine told me that she used my DIY Ranch Seasoning Mix from my Sheet Pan Ranch Chicken Dinner recipe for chicken salad, and THAT, my friends has become a summer favorite in our house too over the last couple weeks!

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Let’s start with the chicken…

To get started, you’ll need to choose a method for getting your cooked chicken. Whether that be leftovers from grill night, or you make a whole chicken, you’ll want a good 3-4 cups in order to make enough chicken salad for a few days. I like to use my Instant Pot to make a whole chicken in the summer so I’m not heating up the whole house, but a slow cooker will achieve the same outcome without turning the oven on. If you are in the cooler months of the year, and don’t mind turning the oven on, my Mayo Roasted Chicken makes the most incredibly flavorful, juicy chicken in less time than you think!

Prep Day Shredded BBQ Chicken

Now for the easy part!

Once your chicken is ready, the rest is done in minutes! Pile in all of the ingredients for the chicken salad into your food processor and pulse away. You can see how coarsely chopped the stuff is here – I don’t fuss with making it perfect. If you don’t have a food processor, you can chop it up and mix in the mayo and seasoning by hand. You can customize your Ranch Chicken Salad to your tastes too! I always use onion and pepper, and, depending on the season, I use fresh fruit too. Usually I add apple or grapes to chicken salad, but since we are in the middle of summer, I used peaches this week, and it was incredible! Blueberries are another summer fruit that works good. Change up the veggies to what is in season too! You can add spinach to bump up the veggies without changing the flavor, or broccoli works well too. 

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Let’s talk about the chicken salad consistency

If you like a chunkier chicken salad, pulse or chop the components less. You can also take it to a full puree to make a super spread-able chicken salad for pinwheels and wraps. This method goes over well with toddlers, and makes a great way to get some meat on their plate! I always fall somewhere in the middle of chunky and smooth as you can see in the image below. To achieve this, I pulsed a few times, scraped the sides down, and then repeated that 3-4 times. It works great for sandwiches as well as making it a fun scoop-able chicken salad for veggies or crackers.

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Ranch Chicken Salad serving ideas!

The sky is the limit here! I’d also love to hear if you serve it in a new way – use the comments below to tell us how you serve chicken salad!

  • Use the chicken salad how you would use any dip or spread with veggie sticks, crackers, or even potato wedges or chips as the vehicles.
  • One of my girls prefers chicken salad straight out of the bowl with spoon, and there is nothing wrong with that!
  • There is always the classic sandwich too, and if you don’t tolerate grains, you can make a lettuce wrap, or mix the chicken salad into a big salad.
Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!
Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!
Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Onto the recipes!

Let’s start with the Ranch Seasoning Mix! It is posted in my Ranch Chicken dinner, but for your convenience, I added it here too. This mix is so nice to keep in the spice cabinet for Ranch potatoes, or making dips and dressings, as well as adding to this chicken salad. Ranch season packets could work, but flavors vary from brand to brand so play around with the amount (and watch those sneaky ingredients!). I like this Ranch season packet with clean ingredients if I’m using a packet.

DIY Ranch Seasoning Mix

Ingredients

Instructions

  • Whisk everything together in a jar or container that has a lid. Store at room temp in an airtight container.

Notes

To make Ranch dressing with your Ranch seasoning mix, whisk about 3-4 teaspoons of the Ranch seasoning mix with 1 cup of sour cream, Greek yogurt, mayo, or coconut yogurt and add splashes of raw milk or coconut milk to thin it out to the consistency you like. You can keep it thick like a dip, or drippier for dressing.
Sheet Pan Ranch Chicken & Veggies :: Gluten & Dairy Free, PLUS a DIY Ranch Seasoning Mix!

Ranch Chicken Salad recipe

And here’s how to make the Ranch chicken salad! This is going to be a lifesaver on a busy night or use it for packing those lunchboxes!

Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

Ingredients

  • 3-4 cups cooked chicken I use my Instant Pot to make an easy whole chicken to save money, but any cooked/leftover chicken works!
  • 1/2 cup mayo of choice Start with this amount, & add more if you like it creamier.
  • 1 tbsp Ranch Seasoning from the recipe above
  • 1/2 bell pepper sliced into strips
  • 1 small red onion (or 1/2 large) quartered, and then halved
  • 1 cup fresh fruit of choice use what is in season! I used peaches here because it is the middle of summer, but apples and grapes are our favorite! Blueberries are good in the summer as well.

Instructions

  • Put all of the ingredients into your food processor, and pulse until desired consistency. You truly could process until smooth if your kids prefer more of a spread-able texture that can be rolled up into a tortilla for pinwheels! Or, leave it chunkier by pulsing less. If you like it super chunky, hand chopping will give you the best result. For the texture you see in this post, you'll pulse a few times, then scrape the sides down, then pulse again a few times, and scrape down. I did this a total of 4 times I'd say.

Notes

  • I get the Primal Kitchen Mayo in the picture above from Costco. There are a few different healthy oil based mayos in the store now using avocado oil! OR you can make your own mayo in minutes. My classic mayo recipe is in my cookbook, The Little Lunchbox Cookbook.
  • Ranch season packets could work, but flavors vary from brand to brand so play around with the amount (and watch those sneaky ingredients!). I like this Ranch season packet with clean ingredients.
  • Change up the veggies/fruit to what is in season! You can add spinach to bump up the veggies without changing the flavor, or broccoli works well too. 
Healthy Ranch Chicken Salad :: An Easy Gluten & Dairy Free Meal Prep for the Week!

More real food recipes you might like!

Batch Up Meals Breakfast Ideas Dinner Ideas Healthy Kids and Teens Lunch Ideas Nourishing Staples Real Food 101 Real Food Tips RGN Meal Plans

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

July 12, 2021

The weather is hot, and the produce is abundant! Create a nourishing 2 week meal plan with this fresh summer inspiration!

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

Product links in this post are affiliate links. It does not cost you anything, and helps maintain the free information on this site, as well as answer the questions of “what brand do you use?” Please know I never personally recommend any product I wouldn’t use on my own family.

Summer lovin’!

Whew! This summer is flying! I really wanted to get second summer meal plan up for you, and I sincerely hope that you are enjoying all that summer has to offer where you live! We have been hitting up all of the summer fruit U-Pick stands from strawberries to cherries, and this week, we’ll head out for those beautiful Michigan blueberries. The farmer’s markets here are loaded with veggies too, and I have some great meal ideas to help you through the rest of this summer!

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

START HERE!!!

If you are new to this space, I would recommend that you pop over to my PART 1 Summer Meal Plan before you go any further here. There is a load of really great information about how to cook in the summer heat, my approaches to meal planning, and some other helpful tips that will help make this whole process a whole lot easier for you! After you read through Summer Meal Plan Part 1, and get an idea of how those meals flow, you’ll be all set up to roll right into this Summer Meal Plan Part 2!

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

Let’s talk summer outings and packed summer lunches

One thing that I did not touch on in Summer Meal Plan Part 1 was that even though we aren’t in school for a few months, we DO still have to pack meals here and there! Whether its for a sunny beach day, a day trip to the park, or a road trip to the zoo, packed lunches don’t just disappear because school is done for the summer. I pack in different containers for family trips than I do for school lunches. When we go on family trips, there is usually a large cooler involved, instead of each child carrying their own individual lunchbox in their backpack. It’s just a different dynamic than school. As much as I am a sold-out, die-hard fan of our school year Planetboxes, they just don’t pack realistically very well in a cooler. They are heavy for one, and for outdoor spaces like the beach, I noticed how the sand would get in the metal hinges and it was just hard to clean. I have these Sistema lunchboxes That are super light weight and pack in a cooler well for the whole family. (There is also a larger one than the linked above and pictured below – my oldest uses THIS one)

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

Take advantage of your evening down time

Listen, I’m the FIRST person to raise my hand for an evening beach sunset swim and toes in the sand. We only get a handful of months to enjoy our powdery beach sand, warm sun, and gorgeous Lake Michigan sunsets! But we don’t do it every night, and on the evenings where the sun is just starting to think about coming down, a lot of times I’ll spend about 15 minutes getting *something* ready for the next day. It might be getting a batch of blueberry muffins baked off for the morning, or stirring up a summer salad to make lunchtime a little quicker the next day, or maybe you get a dozen eggs in the Instant Pot so that you have easy to grab hard boiled eggs for the next few days. If you have kids that stay up a little longer in the summer, pull them alongside you and make them a part of it. You’ll be surprised at how much it helps when there are 2 sets of hands in getting tasks done.

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}

SUMMER MEAL PLAN PART 2!

Again, if you have NOT read through Summer Meal Plan Part 1, hop over there first, to see the flow, and then you can put both Part 1 and Part 2 together – that’s 4 WEEKS total of summer meals! Here is your free PDF of Summer Meal Plan Part 2!

Short and sweet!

So talk to me! How are summer meals going in your house? Are these summer meal plans helping you this season? Summer is so sacred. These few months are just so, so sweet, and I truly hope that having a little bit of a meal flow idea has helped you enjoy your summer just a little bit more!

Nourishing 2 Week Meal Plan {Summer Inspired Part 2}