Egg salad with mayo is a thing of the past. Welcome to the new age of cottage cheese in egg salad. I found this recipe in my moms 1980’s Southern Living cookbook and thought it was worth a try and I’m glad I did. Cottage cheese is one of my favorite snack foods for any time of day and what better lunch idea than mixing cottage cheese with hard-boiled eggs and turning it into a spread you can put on toast with sliced avocado or some slices of cucumber?

Like any good egg salad, it starts with hard-boiled. Growing up my mom used to have a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled chillin’ in the fridge and as an adult, I think it is brilliant! Grab and go eggs? There are SO many things you can quickly make when you have cooked eggs ready-to-eat in your fridge and egg salad is just a no-brainer.

From working in the industry for so long, I have a go-to technique for preparing egg salad. You separate the yolks from the white to create the base of the egg salad, similar to how you would assemble a deviled egg, then chop the whites to fold into the base. I don’t love just a mushy salad, I love a little bit of texture to bite into. My chef-y way of “chopping” the egg whites is to push them through a wire screen. Working in a restaurant, you learned this technique to make any bulk deli salad. Trust me, it’s way more fun to forcibly push egg whites through a screen than just chopping the egg whites with a knife on a cutting board. Boring!