Well, at least tonight they were interesting leftovers….

I had three things I wanted to use tonight: my almost-cooked chicken, buttermilk, and lettuce. I got to thinking that even if my chicken wasn’t fully cooked, I could still do something to it. Something like… frying.

I cut up some of the leftover white meat as well as some bread into bite-sized pieces. Then, I prepared a dredge of flour, cayenne pepper, salt, garlic powder, and freshly ground black pepper. I set some chicken fat (leftover from stock makings a while back) and canola oil in an oven-safe pan over medium high heat. I put the chicken in the flour mixture, then the buttermilk, then the flour mixture again. Once the fats were plenty hot, I started frying. Use a splatter guard, if you ever attempt anything like this, because OW. You’ll probably want to use longer tongs than I did to turn the meat, because again, OW.

After the chicken was golden brown and lovely on both sides, I removed it to some paper towels. I turned the broiler on and threw the bread cubes in the hot pan, where they soaked up the lovely fat. Then, I put the pan under the broiler and waited for the bread to become those gorgeous croutons from last Sunday.

While that was going on, I washed and dried some romaine and mixed together some ingredients for a simple salad dressing (red wine vinegar, dijon mustard, tabasco, salt, pepper, and garlic powder). I removed the pan from the oven and added the croutons to the paper towels where the chicken was residing. I took the leftover fat and mixed that in with the salad dressing, then tossed it with the lettuce. On top, I put the chicken and croutons. Lots of yum. However, my amounts were a little off, and there wasn’t really enough lettuce to call it a salad. It was still damn good, though.

I know, kind of a rehash of last Sunday. I am really happy that I was able to find a use for that chicken. I thought I was eventually going to be throwing it out in all of it’s kind of gross under-cooked-ness.