Tag Archives: what to do with leftovers

Food

Using up left-over chicken

I always seem to have chicken left over. Is it just me? Do people hate my chicken? I digress. The point is, I always have some of it around, and the efficient side of me wants to have something innovative to do with it (to digress some more, apparently a few restaurants in Hong Kong have started charging people for the food that they leave on their plates at all you can eat restaurants. I guess they have so much garbage there that they don’t know what to do with it — so it’s one of the ways they’re trying to reduce garbage. I guess they didn’t grow up with my mom — let’s just say that if you did you would never leave food on your plate.). My husband doesn’t like leftovers, so I have to do some food alchemy so that he can’t detect the left-over-ness of it.

I’ve done salads (shred it up, toss it into a salad; or put it together with some mayo and celery and — viola, chicken salad) and casseroles with varying success, but the best ways I’ve found to use it are in fajitas (again, using a shredded version of the chicken) and — my new favorite method — in tortilla soup. In case you don’t know how to make it (or at least don’t know how to do it the way I do, which I am sure is an abomination of the proper way to do it), here’s what I do:

  • Shred up the chicken.
  • Heat up some chicken stock; salt / pepper to taste.
  • Chop up some tomatoes, avocado and cilantro. Distribute some of each into however many bowls you will be serving.
  • Get some tortilla strips (or you can make some, which is pretty easy, and which I used to do, but since the theme of this blog is laziness in this case we’ll assume you buy them).
  • Once the stock is hot, ladle it over the bowls that contain the chicken et al. Throw in some corn if you’d like. I’ve also put in some shredded cheese before, but it’s up to you.
  • That’s it!

Tomorrow I start my hip hop dance class. I watched some hip hop videos online tonight and am realizing that I should be very, very scared. Apparently, you have to have abs and cardiovascular fitness in order to do this for more than 2 minutes. The class is for an hour (which, by the way, is sixty minutes). I may not post tomorrow — I may be at the hospital.