Chicken Deviled Eggs

Nearly all of the deviled egg recipes I have tried so far seem to follow a simple pattern. Mash up the yolks, add in some combination of mustard, mayonnaise, maybe a liquid like vinegar or relish, garnish with parsley or paprika. Maybe bacon here, maybe cheese there, maybe even some cream cheese. But these chicken deviled eggs seem to move beyond that simple deviled egg paradigm. Totally unique and delicious. Here's the recipe:

6 hard-boiled eggs

1/2 cup finely chopped cooked chicken

3 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 tablespoon grated sweet onion

1 tablespoon capers, drained and finely chopped

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon minced parsley

paprika, for garnish

Cook one chicken breast at 350 F for 20 minutes, then chop into very small pieces. Next grate sweet onion, drain and chop capers, and mice parsley. Add chicken, mayonnaise, sweet onion, capers, mustard, and parsley to the mashed yolks. Fill egg white halves with filling and garnish with paprika.

Above: adding the chicken, mayonnaise, and sweet onion to the mashed egg yolks. (Note: at the suggestion of a reader, I have mashed the yolks more finely.)

Above: adding the capers, mustard, and parsley.

Above: the finished product, garnished with paprika.

So there were a lot of interesting things going on in this recipe. First, the filling is basically a chicken salad - and this chicken salad is very good. It has a lot of ingredients, yet none of the ingredients dominate and each contributes something. Most deviled egg recipes I have tried that use parsley use it as a garnish, and here it goes into the filling and paprika is used as the garnish. Yet I think the parsley is needed - maybe it adds just a dash of green, maybe it's just for texture - who knows?

But I really liked these, in spite of the large amount of ingredients and the fact that so many ingredients have to be chopped. The texture, also, is perfect - thick enough to stand up in the egg halves, but not so thick that it can't be easily moved from the bowl to the eggs.

Overall: 77 out of 100 out of 100

Texture: 19 out of 20 (nearly perfect)

Flavor: 18 out of 20

Uniqueness: 17 out of 20

Appearance: 15 out of 20

Ease of preparation: 8 out of 20

Comments?