Sonoma Chicken Salad and quietselkie's Crock Pot "Roasted" Chicken recipes

Sep 14, 2014 11:41

quietselkie's Crock Pot Chicken:

Instead of baking chicken breasts like it says in the other blogs' recipes I link to below, I put a chicken in the crock pot like quietselkie blogged about years ago: a whole chicken sans neck and organs*, an onion peeled and cut up, some rosemary and thyme, and some celery, put in the crock pot. Sprinkle liberally with seasonings: Mrs Dash, poultry seasoning, that sort of thing. Cover and cook it on high for about an hour and a half, then turn it to low and go to bed. Or work. Eight-odd hours later, use a couple of spatulas to lift the chicken out, because it has lost all structural integrity by now. Put the mess in a casserole dish, frying pan, or something else that's big with sides, because a lot of liquid will come with it. Once it's cool enough to handle without burning yourself, pull all the meat out of the stuff you don't want to eat.

If you want to make stock, dump the rest -- skin, bones, gristle, used herbs and veg -- back into the crock pot. I save the neck and organs that come with the chicken for the stock; just put them into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and store them in the fridge. Some fresh veggies wouldn't hurt, like another onion, carrots, celery, a clove of garlic, and a bay leaf or two. I put in a vegetable bouillon cube, too. Cover it with water, put the lid on, and let it cook on low all day or all night. Strain what's left after it's cooled a bit, refrigerate the liquid, skim off the fat, and save the stock in the freezer if you aren't going to use it now.

Back to the chicken itself: once I've picked the meat out, I have about one and a half to two times the amount of chicken I need for this recipe. Depends on the size of the chicken I started with. The rest goes into the freezer so I can use it some other week for enchiladas, tacos, soup, sandwiches ... whatever. Chicken lasts anywhere from three days to a week in the fridge before the bacteria start to make it unhealthy to eat, so that's why I freeze the rest. Put it in a plastic bag and then surround it with foil. I use a Sharpie to label the bag with the date I freeze it; you can freeze cooked poultry for about four months before it starts to go bad. After four to five days of eating stuff with chicken in it, the last thing I want is more chicken.

Note: I'm not making stock today with the leftover chicken bits, so I chucked all the leftover solid parts into the garbage. But there's still some liquid left in the crock pot, so I put it in the fridge for now. I'll skim the fat off once it's solid; grease down the drain clogs pipes, so put grease in the bin. I've frozen stock in ice cube trays before, too. Sometimes I only need a little for a recipe or to moisten some chicken I heat in the oven, so I just pop however many I need out of the ice cube tray.

Sonoma Chicken Salad:

Adapted from here and here. Neither recipe is complete, but put both together, and you have all the ingredients and all the steps. The first link mentions ingredient substitutions and omissions because of reasons, so check it out. Costco used to have this in their deli section, but it was discontinued years ago. arynwy mentioned that someone probably reverse engineered it and blogged about it; thank Google several people did! So I didn't come up with anything here; I'm just combining.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup mayonnaise
4 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons poppy seeds
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
salt and pepper to taste
cooked chicken -- about 3 cups
1 cup pecans
1 1/4 cup craisins/dried cranberries, divided
2 large or 3 smaller stalks celery

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Cook the chicken however you want -- chicken breasts or drumsticks do well in the crock pot, too, or you can cook them in the oven like in either of the links at the beginning of this entry. Once the chicken is cooked, refrigerate it.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Chop the pecans into medium-size pieces: each whole pecan yields 4-6 pieces. Lay the pecans in a single layer on a baking sheet. Toast them in the oven for 7-10 minutes. They burn easily, so keep an eye on them. They should be light brown when they come out. Let them cool, then put them into the fridge.

3. In a medium bowl, combine mayonnaise, vinegar, honey, poppy seeds, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. You can make this dressing up to two days ahead of time. (I also chop 1/4 cup of the cranberries into very small pieces so the flavor gets a head start on mixing with the rest of the dressing.) Cover and refrigerate.

4. Chop the cold chicken into small, bite-size pieces. Cut up the remaining craisins into smaller pieces. Dice the celery into very small pieces (I like the taste but not the texture of celery, so if you like it, bigger pieces are fine). Combine all three in a large bowl with the toasted pecan pieces.

5. At least an hour before serving, pour the dressing over the dry ingredients. Cover, and let it rest in the fridge for a while; the flavors will mix more the longer it sits.

The timetable is pretty long; I wouldn't have time to make this during the week, what with work and everything. I started the crock pot chicken on Saturday night, picked the meat out Sunday morning, then made the dressing and toasted the pecans immediately after. Then I'll do steps four and five Sunday evening and let it rest overnight. I'll make the sandwiches Monday morning.

I used to use croissants to make into sandwiches, but now I just use wheat bread. Complex carbs instead of simple, you know how it is. One recipe takes care of me for the whole week with a few servings left over. (I'll probably give a few cups of this stuff to Dad.) I'll have this and green salads for lunch at least four days this week, if not all five. It's good for picnics or parties, on a sandwich or on crackers. YUM YUM YUM YUM YUM.

recipe, sustenance

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