Meta Salad

A salad made of salad.

It's way too hot to cook, never mind eating hot things. I think July may end up being the month of salads. I've got a couple planned and Taneasha's loving having hers tossed. Hopefully we'll get to see more of that.

Me, I was crazy enough to make chicken broth last week (pics later) and so I've got a bunch of packages of chicken meat in the freezer. We'll ignore the broth for now since soup is entirely out of the question. If you don't happen to have nicely packaged portions of already cooked chicken in your freezer, those rotisserie birds that most grocery stores have handy will work just fine.

Chicken Salad in a Salad

What you need:

• about 2 cups of cooked, chopped chicken
• a bit of onion
• a couple carrots
• 3 or 4 radishes
• 1/4 c parsley
• 2 tbsp dill
• 1 tbsp capers
• 1/2 tsp celery seed
• 1/4 c mayo
• a bit of lemon juice
• large lettuce leaves
• alphalpha sprouts
• tasty tiny tomatos

What you gotta do:

Dice all the veggies into tiny chunks. If you like celery, it would probably work well in this. I don't like celery, so I opted for radishes. Nice crunch, a bit of bite, totally underutilized root. Adds a nice bit of colour too.

Dump all the veggies and herbs and seeds and flowers (capers are flowers) into a bowl with the chicken. Squeeze on some lemon juice. Salt and pepper would work at this point too.

Blob on some mayo. Real mayo.

You should also select a few good sized lettuce leaves and rinse them off. You're going to use them whole, so a salad spinner may not be the right tool for the job. I just rolled mine up in a teatowel to dry them.

Use the lettuce leaves like taco shells. Some alphalpha sprouts in the bottom, then the chicken salad, and a few slices of the tiny awesome tomatos to decorate the top.

Oh yeah, and then sprinkle it with bacon. Everything is better with bacon sprinkles.

I ate mine like tacos, but I suppose you could use a fork if you really wanted to.

And yes, I admit it, I bought the tomatos because they were little and cute, but they really have a great bright sweetness that works well with the tangy mayo and lemon in the dressing.

What have you bought because it was little and cute?

cookie d'oh!

It's round, pink, has a hole in the middle, and is covered with sprinkles.

Apparently to my coworkers, that means something dirty. And telling them it was Homer's doughnut didn't help.

A little while ago one of my coworkers offered to bring me some sprinkles that were taking up space in her cupboard.  I'm never one to turn down offers of ingredients, even sprinkles, so I accepted. I had no idea exactly how much space was being taken up by sprinkles. 

The next day I found one of those large "gallon" sized zip bags on my desk.

A large zip bag can hold a lot of sprinkles.

And since I was still kinda feeling like making other desserts into cookies, I decided to do doughnuts. Homer's doughnuts. Round, pink, with a hole in the middle, covered in sprinkles.

Also, it just so happens that "National Doughnut Day" just passed. Once again, we at Authors Kitchen are totally on top of all the important holidays.

Plain old sugar cookies are perfect for doing silly things to. (perv)

Sugar Cookies

What you need:

• 1 c butter
• 1 c sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp milk
• 3 c flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

(this is a double batch which makes about 4 dozen cookies, and easily cut in half if you are looking to eat them all in one night)

What you gotta do:

In a large bowl, cream the room temperature butter with the sugar until it's all soft and fluffy. You'll start to lose the gritty feeling from the sugar if you do it long enough.

Add the eggs, vanilla, and milk.

Beat this again with your Popeye arms, or your fancy schmancy mixer that has its own speshul place on the counter, until it's shiney and kinda looks like cake frosting. (Really, it kinda is cake frosting).

Normally, I'd just dump the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and stir, but I had a minion with me, and so I employed him to sift the dry ingredients together in a small bowl.

I also had him crack the eggs into the creamed butter. No shells this time!

Add the sifted flour to the creamed butter and egg mixture in two batches.

After the second one, you'll have a soft, but not quite sticky dough. In order to handle it and roll it, you'll need to chill it a bit first.

Divide it in half, wrap it in plastic, and let is sit around in the fridge for at least half an hour. I don't like to leave dough in the fridge too long because it becomes too stiff to handle. It should be pliable, and not too cold to the touch.

Liberally flour your counter, your rolling pin, and the dough. At first, you're going to want to move it around and reflour everything regularly so it doesn't stick to the counter. If your dough is stuck to the counter, there will be no saving the shapes you cut, and you'll have to do it all over again.

Roll the dough to just under a quarter inch thick.

If you don't have cookie cutters, a wine glass works nicely to make round cookies.

I'd finally found a doughnut cutter so I cut doughnuts and holes. Either save up and reroll the holes to make more doughnuts, or bake them all separately so they don't get overdone.

You want the cookies to lose their gloss, and be just barely golden on the bottom.

7-8 minutes at 350 will do that. I know you already preheated your oven. You're smart like that. Just like me.

"I am so smart. S-M-R-T."

To make the pink glaze you need:

• Icing (powdered) sugar
• Milk
• Red Dye
• Some kind of flavourant (vanilla is best, but I'd managed to run out, so I used peppermint)

One of these days I'll actually measure how much icing sugar and milk I use to do this kind of thing. Really, just dump a bunch of sugar in a bowl. Add milk a tiny splash at a time, a few drops of flavourant, and keep stirring until you have something the consistency of really thick laundry detergent.

It should blob off the end of a spoon at first, but then turn into something ribbon like.

Two bloody drops was all I needed

to make Pepto-Bismol Pink!

Lay the cookies out on parchment paper as close together as you can. Dribble and blob the glaze all over the cookies. Then add sprinkles by the handful.

If you don't have a gallon of sprinkles, you might want to work on accuracy in your application. It also might help your cookies not look like they were made by a five year old.

I'm okay with my cookies looking like they were made by a five year old.

Let these set on the counter for about 20 minutes. The glaze will harden just enough that it holds onto the sprinkles and looks solid, but it will still be soft and gooey when you bite it.

 Did you know there was a National Doughnut Day??