103. Mandarin Chicken Salad

This is a very special meal. No, not because it was fancy, involved weird ingredients or included a Jell-O mold. This is special because it is my 10th completed Dinner is Served! Which means that I only have 108 cards left. Sweet Christ on a cracker. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

This meal was super-easy and was specifically chosen because it utilized the leftover chicken from #10 Roast Chicken. But before I actually talk about this salad, I want to point out something. So far how many times have I used fucking mandarin oranges and slivered almonds? It seems as though they are in every other meal! I feel rather confident that no one in the 70’s ever had to worry about scurvy and whatever disease that almond consumption would stave off because one or both are included in every other meal.

Anyhoo, this was super-duper easy and very cheap. And it made a lot of it (which sadly, I had to throw away. We didn’t eat it quick enough).

Yes, so this was a wallet-friendly meal.

• Kraft French dressing was on sale for $1.49 each.
• Mandarin Oranges 1 can for $1.00.
• Green onions (scallions) were .99 cents a bunch.
• Red leaf lettuce $2.99 a pound. Had about 3/4 pound, so what is that like around $2.oo? Dear Lord, don’t make me try to do math in my head.
• Bouillon cubes were on sale 3 packs for $4.00 so I stocked up–2 boxes of chicken and one box of beef. I am good to go on broth/bouillon.
• To fill the left-hand corner of the photo I bought a little loaf of poppy seed bread which normally would be $1.50, but for some reason was dropped to $1.00. Yay! (it was good, too. A win for the Safeway).
• I buy celery by the stick at the Safeway because I would never in a million years go through a whole bunch of celery unless I was doing some weird cleanse diet where you really do have to burn off more calories than you can consume. But I would never do anything like that anyway, even if I was getting married or going to a reunion of some sort. That is what plastic surgery is for. Long story short, the cost of celery was very nominal, under a dollar.

Already in my kitchen: almonds (of course!), rice (finished off a box of Uncle Ben’s), powdered ginger, soy sauce, leftover chicken.

I didn’t put any ‘cooked ham strips’ in this thing because I didn’t want to just chop up some deli ham and I sure as hell didn’t want to get a ham steak. Whatever.

This was easy and tasty and perfect for a weeknight meal (I made it the day before so it chilled overnight). It did have a whisper of the orient with the soy sauce, scallions, and ginger, which provided a wee kick of flavor. It was necessary since all the other ingredients were quite bland. Those elements mixed nicely with the French dressing. To be quite honest, aside from giving the salad its name and making it look pretty, the oranges were superfluous. They were fine being there, but they didn’t have to be. They were sweet and sloppy.

Cleve liked this salad very much. But you know who really liked it? Brian. Brian the cat. This was the night that we learned that he can jump his fat ass all the way up to the kitchen counter. Oh, yeah, I forgot. This was why we didn’t eat the rest of it, not because there was so much left.