First off, happy Earth Day! I thought about doing an Earth Day post, but other time commitments prevented me. I’d like to direct you to a fabulous post from Herban Lifestyle about how to make Earth Day everyday. Click here.
Frugal Living: Get the Most out of Your Chicken Leftovers
If you’ve read here here the past few days, you’ll know that I got really excited by our spicy barbeque smoked chicken earlier in the week. We have continued to enjoy it, each time with a little variation in its saucing to make it fit a new menu. Monday night we had paninis with the chicken in a smokey, sweet barbeque sauce and good cheese, served alongside spinach soup in the beautiful bowls I won from Polly’s Path.
Wednesday I cut a big bowl of fresh lettuces and endive from our garden, pulled some carrots and radishes to slice, and clipped some chive blossoms for what I called buffalo chicken salad. I sauced some of the chicken with hot sauce and used that with bleu cheese and homemade croutons to pile on top the salad. I did take a photo of the lettuce (see below), but an untimely phone call and then hunger distracted me from shooting the salad.
Tonight? It’s Mr. Homesteader’s cooking night, but I hear that we’ll be having something Mexican and that he’ll be using the smoked chicken.
Do you cook whole chickens? If so, what’s your favorite way to dress up the leftovers?
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Lettuce Lessons: Selecting Looseleaf Seeds
This is the big bowl of loose leaf lettuce, endive, and a little chard I picked from the garden. The red frilly lettuce is Lolla Rossa. If you see red and green on the same leaf, it could be Lolla Rossa inner leaves, or it could be Marvel of Four Seasons. The lime green lettuce is called Black-Seeded Simpson. It and Lolla Rossa are so attractive that I think either of them would be lovely as a border around a flower bed. The frilly medium green stuff is in fact curly endive, and the leaf in sort of the middle left with red rib and veins is ruby chard. All of these lettuces and other greens are easy to grow in cooler weather, and the chard has actually survived summer heat and freezing winters twice now as well as repeated cuttings in between. We like growing head lettuces like butterhead and batavian, but these loose-leaf lettuces are really easy to grow for cut-and-come-again picking throughout the season.
Do you have favorite salad greens? What grows well in your area? Do tell!
Copyright 2010 Ozarkhomesteader. Short excerpts with full URL and attribution to Ozarkhomesteader are welcome. Please ask me for permission to use photographs.
Your lettuce looks absolutely gorgeous. What a wonderful array of colors and textures. Yum
Thank you!
And thank you so much for mentioning my Earth Day article to your readers!
Thank you for writing it. I was actually feeling kind of guilty about not doing one myself, and then I saw yours.
My favorite salad green I accidentally discovered. It’s an invasive weed called Miner’s Lettuce. I read somewhere that it was edible, and since I had a considerable sum growing in our garden, I decided to try some. They remind me of spinach, except juicier. They are excellent with a splash of Italian dressing.
Cold, smoked chicken and cold, smoked turkey are probably my two favorite meats. I like them in sandwiches, soups, salads, Mexican dishes, casseroles-anything!!
As far as greens-I LOVE anything green, as long as it is not too bitter. I will still eat bitter greens, but I put a little heat on them first.
And guess what-we have two more newborn kitties that have been found to add to the large pack of kittens who need a home. These two showed up at my in-laws’, and are barely 2 weeks old. They are working really hard on me to adopt them.
Miner’s lettuce is also called purslane, isn’t it, Chasmania? Or am I remembering that incorrectly? I like it too, but it starts to bolt here really fast.
Polly, I can’t wait to see what Mr. Homesteader does with that chicken tonight. I hope the kittens get homes. I dealt with a western-style stand-off on our porch this morning, so I need to get the teen mom and her brother off to good homes as quickly as possible, before the fur flies.
I like to make Waldorf chicken salad with leftover chicken. Just chop up some chicken, apples, celery, and red onion, and toss it with raisins, walnuts, mayonnaise, mint, and curry powder…. Once I moved to Scotland, however, this evolved into “Why The Heck Not?” chicken salad, in which I had none of the ingredients for waldorf chicken salad except chicken and mayonnaise. However, I did have pineapple, cucumber, and radishes… I figured, pineapples and apples are both sweetish fruit! And cucumber and celery are both crunchy and green and mild-flavored! And radishes have a similar texture to red onion! So it all went in together and turned out just delightfully.
Chicken tacos or quesadillas are always a good call, too.
Thursday night was quesadillas. I love chicken Waldorf salad, and I’ll bet it’ll be great with the smoked chicken. Thank you, Rachel!
Wow, no apples, celery, and red onion in Scotland???