One chicken, three meals. See the other two recipes here:
#1 Sweet and Spicy Glazed Chicken
#3 Homemade Chicken Stock/Chicken Soup
Besides being tasty, let’s talk about another reason why buying the whole chicken makes sense, or should I say makes cents? That’s right, I’m talking about the $$$.
I bought my chicken, full price, for about $6. Monday night, I made a beautiful and delicious roast chicken; let’s call that meal #1. After dinner, I stripped the remaining meat off the frame and stuck both meat and bones in the fridge.
Yup bones, too, but that’s tomorrow’s post.
Yesterday, just before lunch I pulled out the leftover chicken and got ready for meal #2: Cranberry-Walnut Chicken Salad.
I had about 2 cups of chicken left over, but we are a small family. If you have less left, just estimate and adjust your other ingredients to make the chicken salad. It’s a really forgiving recipe.
If you have no chicken left over, that’s sad. Next time make two chickens. You can’t go wrong with having extra chicken around the house. Besides chicken salad, cooked chicken comes in handy for topping green salads, making wraps or sandwiches, casseroles, soups, chicken enchiladas or burritos, chicken kabobs, chicken-gumbo, chicken fricassee… sorry, I just started channeling Benjamin Buford ‘Bubba’ Blue for a minute.
Anyway, my point is, cooked chicken is a good thing to have around.
- 2 cups cubed cooked chicken
- ½ cup dried cranberries
- ¼ cup walnuts, chopped
- ½ cup celery, sliced
- 3 green onions, sliced
- 3 Tbs mayonnaise
- ¼ cup plain yogurt
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 Tbs dried oregano
- 1 tsp salt
- Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
- In a large bowl, combine chicken, cranberries, walnuts and onions; mix well.
- In a small bowl, combine mayonnaise, yogurt, lemon juice, oregano and pepper; pour over chicken mixture. Mix gently.
- Tastes best if you have time to refrigerate, covered, for 1 to 2 hours.
Tomorrow, we talk stock.
I did this last week with some leftover turkey! YUM!!
It would be good even without chicken. Maybe some fabulous fall, orchard fresh apples in leiu of the chicken. Mmmm.