Feel the Love (Chicken Salad, Lavender Green Tea, and fresh berries)

My girlfriend Shannon has a philosophy for any major purchase: "Feel the Love."

It's okay to spend $100 on a fabulous pair of jeans IF you feel $1oo worth of love. But sometimes, even if something is reduced to $20 from that original $100, and even if it fits, if you're not feeling the love worth the $20, it's not worth buying. Makes sense, doesn't it?

I do that with food. I won't pay $3 for a loaf of factory-processed sliced bread. And occasionally I feel the $4.50 worth of love for the bakery bread I have deemed "magic bread." (Giant's multigrain sandwich bread, it makes the GREATEST toast ever.)

I made a second walk around the farmers market yesterday because I thought I felt the love for the $6.25 fairly large loaf of pecan-raisin bread. It screamed "good toast," "eat me with peanut butter" and "I'm not just bread, I'm dessert." So, I bought it.

Now, remember I spent $40ish total, and this included $15 worth of rabbit. That means 1/2 of what I spent was on two items: a rabbit and a loaf of bread. The rest was produce and spices.

In the same "feel the love" philosophy, I took four organic green tea tea bags and the last two teaspoons or so of my expensive bottle of lavender honey to brew iced tea. (The tea bags were a find at the warehouse club last summer and they're individually wrapped so I don't have to worry about them aging poorly.

Meanwhile, I'm making some plain-style chicken salad to go with the fancy bread. My daughter and I already cut the fresh strawberries (and knowing her, by lunch they may be gone.) I had planned fresh apricot in my chicken salad, but I don't think my apricots are ripe. I slipped a pinch of It's a dilly seasoning, garlic pepper and curry into the cooking chicken.

I sliced and shredded about two cups of chicken, added about two teaspoons of fresh parsley from my garden and at least two, maybe more, teaspoons of fresh chives from my garden.

I lubricated it with 1/2 cup vegan light canola mayonnaise (I hate real mayo, always have. So does my dad). My recipe says 1 cup "dressing" but I thought that would be too wet for the amount of chicken I had, so I added, in addition to the canola mayo, three tablespoons Wegmans ranch yogurt dressing.

I can't wait to serve on the new bread with thin-sliced tomato and red leaf lettuce from the farmers market. I wish it were lunch time.