Chicken Salad Picnic

Doesn't this salad look delicious? My recipe today was adapted for seasonal on hand ingredients from this one at Peanut Butter and Peppers.
Doesn’t this salad look delicious? My recipe today was adapted for seasonal on hand ingredients from this one at Peanut Butter and Peppers.

Where I live every night of the summer we have Music in the Park from 7-8:30pm. It is such a lovely way to spend a summer evening that I find I am constantly trying to make portable easy dinners so that we can enjoy the spontaneity of all summer has to offer. I cooked a chicken last night and we still have a fridge full of cherries which led to the inspiration for tonight’s dinner.

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Chicken Salad Picnic

Chicken Salad Picnic

Ingredients

  • Chicken breasts from last nights dinner - diced (from our farmers market)
  • 3 diced green onions (from our CSA)
  • A small handful of chopped walnuts (from our bulk order)
  • 1 cup sweet dark cherries, pitted and chopped (plus 6 to 8 whole for juicing)
  • 2 Tbsp sunflower oil
  • 1 Tbsp red wine vinegar (or kombucha)
  • 2 Tbsp cherry juice (from our yard)
  • 2 tsp honey (from our local apiary)
  • 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves (from the garden)
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Mix chicken, onions, nuts, cherries and thyme together. Set aside.
  2. Whisk together oil, vinegar, juice, honey, salt and pepper.
  3. Pour over chicken mixture and stir to coat.
  4. Pack into a bucket with an ice pack and into the picnic cooler it goes!
  5. I picked a bunch of crisp lettuce from our garden to serve it on. I toss a couple ice cubes in the bowl of lettuce to help keep it crisp in the summer heat.
https://consumableearth.com/chicken-salad-picnic/

I’ve been making chicken salad after a recipe from the Narrows restaurant (I think that’s where it came from), adding a tablespoon of stone ground mustard to mayonnaise, balsalmic vinegar, and a shot of hot sauce to the mayo and throwing in dried cherries (Michigan’s are the best), and walnuts with the onion.

Cherry Crisp

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Cherry Crisp

Cherry Crisp

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 3/4 cup rolled oats
  • 1/3 cup butter
  • 1/3 cup sugar (divided)
  • 1 pound (about two full cups) tart cherries, pitted
  • 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 325°.
  2. Combine flour and oats.
  3. Cut in butter until mixture is crumbly.
  4. Mix in 1/3 cup sugar; set aside for topping.
  5. Sprinkle cherries with cinnamon, nutmeg.
  6. Pour into a greased 8 x 8-inch baking pan.
  7. Sprinkle topping mixture evenly over cherry mixture.
  8. Bake at 325° for 10-20 minutes or until your smell something delicious
https://consumableearth.com/cherry-crisp/

This recipe is adapted from The Recipe Boy Blog where he adapted it from The Fruit Orchard cookbook he scored from a local orchard in Virgina. The tasty crisp in this picture is the one he made for his family.

Chicken Bone Broth

After we roast our chicken I make broth from the carcass in the same roasting pan. I recently learned that adding salt too early in the broth process is crazy bad for you and so now I don’t add salt to my broth until it goes into the jars for the fridge or freezer.

Here is a beauty of a recipe from Claire’s Holistic Pursuits I will admit that I have never added more than an onion to my bone broth.

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Chicken Bone Broth

Chicken Bone Broth

Ingredients

  • Grass fed + free range or organic bones – I normally use beef bones from the butcher or a left over chicken carcass ( you want chemical free here so you aren’t drinking those toxins in concentrated amounts)
  • 1 -2 tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar (acid thats needed to leech the mineral from the bones)
  • Filtered water (again, we want low levels of toxins)
  • Any chopped vegetables you care to throw in – potatoes, leek, celery, onion, carrot. I save up all my vege scraps from the week + use them too.
  • Desired herbs + spices: bay leaves, oregano, rosemary, peppercorns, parsley etc.

Instructions

  1. Place your bones in a slow cooker or pot
  2. Cover with water + add in the Apple Cider Vinegar
  3. Let this sit for 20 or so minutes so the acid can set to work removing the minerals from the bones
  4. Add in your veggies, herbs + spices
  5. Place on a low heat for up to 48hrs if beef bones or 24hrs if chicken bones
  6. Remove from the heat + strain out the (now sad looking) veggies + bones, discard.
  7. Bottle the broth to keep in the fridge or store in ice-cube trays or in serving portions in the freezer for up to 3-4months.
https://consumableearth.com/chicken-bone-broth/

Baby Greens Salad

Photo credit Gourmet Centric
Look at this delicious bowl of greens from Gourmet Centric. This isn’t even the salad it’s just one of the ingredients in the delicious duck confit Julie made. She really is inspiring and you ought to check out her blog sometime. Drool. http://gourmetcentric.com/

A huge salad for lunch has got to be one of my guilty pleasures in life. Curling up into a chair with a book, a bowl and a fork is a daily source of joy and nourishment.

Today my salad consisted of baby greens, salad turnips, radishes and carrots from my back yard and my CSA box. Topped with chopped walnuts from our Rancho Vignola order. My dressing was made with Made with Love Crimson Love, kombucha and sunflower oil. I haven’t figured out yet what to use in place of the fancy oils we buy for salad dressings.

While I chop greens for my salad I learn a new song. I try to learn one a week but sometimes I am slow.  This week it is The Dreamer by The Tallest Man on Earth because the man I love thinks it’s a fun one to play on the guitar.

Check out this

Fancy Simple Chicken Dinner

Tonight we made a belated Father’s Day dinner. I had wanted to finish it off with a cherry pie ironically I’ve been too overwhelmed with cherries to accomplish it!

Look at this gorgeous roast chicken from HonestCooking.com see how it looks flat? That is a juicy tender chicken right there. I bet it falls right to pieces. Check out the stellar instructions over on their blog.

Our roasted chicken cost $16 at the market this weekend. I cooked it in a roaster with about 1/4cup of water in the bottom and sprinkled a few herbs on top. Lid on and in the oven at lunch time at 200C makes for a juicy tender chicken by dinner and the house doesn’t get hot because the oven is on low.

I sliced several beets and steamed them briefly while I chopped carrots and garlic scapes for a salad and made a simple wild rice risotto to go along with it. I sautéed shallots and scapes with some butter then added two different kinds of rice. My wild rice comes from Naosap Harvest in Manitoba, did you know we grow rice here in Canada? Pretty neat huh? The brown rice comes from my organic buying co-op. We go through roughly 25lbs or rice per year.

Photo credit Food and Spice Blog
Check out this tasty looking salad from Lisa’s Kitchen. She has a fancy beet salad recipe over on her blog.