Monday

The most spectacular thing that happened today was that I made a chicken salad.

Which I'm okay with, really. I could actually use a break from the spectacular.

But back to the chicken salad. Maybe I should make this a food blog.

Yes, I can see it now. A chronicle of my nightly dinners and life stories to go with it.

And no, it will not be like that blog movie about the Julies. My recipes will not be nearly as ambitious. I want my recipes to reach out to the masses. No elitist pastries or créme brûlée found here.

I just barely had this food blog epiphany, so no pictures tonight, but I am seeing cleverly angled photographs of canned soup in the future.

Here goes, my first try at food blogging.

ALEC IS A GIRL'S NAME AND OTHER VEGETABLES.

(I just made that up now. Catchy, right?)

Monday: Chicken Salad with a side of Toast

By Alec.

I had a left over package of ranch dressing from the sub shop down the road that I have been saving on my shelf of the fridge for weeks now.

It was left over french fry dip that I didn't have the heart to throw away. Fast food ranch is just so much better than Kraft.

So last week, when I went to the grocery store, I decided to do something about that small packet of ranch sitting on my fridge shelf. I decided to buy some lettuce to go with it.

I bought the pre-cut kind, because the chances of me both washing and cutting my lettuce were slim to none. I hate washing lettuce. And the last thing I want to do after I wash lettuce is slice it up.

So I brought that bag of pre-cut, ready to wash, lettuce home and stuck it in the very back corner of my fridge. And I left it there, in the back of my fridge, until I was ready to wash it.

I finally decided tonight, after a weekend of eating ice cream and salsa, that it was time for a salad. So I pulled out the lettuce, grabbed my packet of ranch, and even found a frozen chicken breast in the back of my freezer. And thus commenced the making of the Monday Chicken Salad with a side of Toast.

Ingredients:

1. Bag of pre-cut, ready to wash, salad

2. Frozen Chicken Breast

3. One large egg

4. Package of fast food ranch dressing

5. 3 Tablespoons of balsamic vinaigrette dressing not from a fast food restaurant.

6. Sliced almonds

7. One piece of bread

8. Tablespoon of store brand honey

Instructions:

Open the bag of lettuce and put a lot in a strainer. Your going to need a lot because once you open the bag of lettuce you will realize that your fridge froze many pieces of the lettuce, and the ones that are not frozen are brown because you waited too long to eat it.

Proceed to rinse the lettuce in cold water, even though you may be tempted to rinse it in hot water because A) it is frozen and B) hot water is more efficient at killing germs.

Next, pick out every piece of lettuce that is brown, freezer burned, or just looks too funny to eat.

This is not the time to be worried about discrimination. If the lettuce looks funny, throw it down the garbage disposal.

Once your lettuce is prepared, set it in the sink, and reach into the very back of your freezer where you will find one frozen chicken breast sitting in a Costco-size bag from a year ago.

Pull the chicken out of the bag and hit it against your plate to try to get rid of the ice crystals that have formed on it. When that doesn't work, simply wash it in some warm water.

Place the washed chicken on a plate and microwave for one minute. Turn. Microwave for an additional one minute.

As the frozen chicken breast is being defrosted rapidly, get your egg and crack it over a warm frying pan. If you had time, you could boil the egg, but since you have homework, just scramble the thing in some olive oil.

Your chicken should be sufficiently microwaved now, so pull it out and cut it into uneven cubes. Essentially, the goal here is to just chop at it until the pieces seem relatively bite size.

Now, pour the lettuce, the scrambled egg, the cubed chicken and the almonds into a medium sized bowl.

Open the package of ranch dressing that you have been saving for well-over a month and prepare to pour it on your salad.

But WAIT.

Look at the ranch first. Because chances are, its expiration date has come and gone, and now it is a weird separation of milk and vegetable oil that does not look very edible at all.

If that is the case, pull out the next best thing, some high-quality balsamic dressing, and pour it over the salad until it looks like you won't be able to taste the brown pieces of lettuce you missed in the pulling out process.

Then grab that piece of bread, pop it in the toast, and finish it off by spraying some honey on top.

Don't forget to remove any additional pieces of frozen lettuce as you come across them.

Bon Appetite!