Grilled Chicken Salad

So the last two days I was down at my sister's house.  She has this beautiful backyard garden and for dinner last night she told me we were having grilled chicken salad.  "Oh!" I said, "That sounds like something for my blog!"  She replied that it's more than perfect, since the lettuce came from her garden, so it's free, even!

First, we marinated some chicken she bought on sale.  She belongs to the store's shopper's club so she only paid $10.72 for this bag.  She started talking about how many pounds were in the bag and how many pounds she thought we were using and I responded with something like, "whoah, the bag comes with three split breasts and we're cooking one, so it's 1/3 of the bag, also known as a little more than $3 worth."  (Now that I'm home, I did the math - it was $3.57, assuming all 3 breasts were of equal size.  To be on the "safe" side - we can call it $3.75 worth of chicken)

She diced the chicken, then shook on garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and left it in the fridge for a few hours while we took the kids out.  When we were ready to eat, we pan-fried it and went outside to pick the lettuce. 

She and her husband had planted gardens in the "raised beds" shown here, including radishes, tomatoes, lettuce, and spinach.  I'm sure they've got other plants I haven't identified.  I am not nearly such an accomplished gardener.  My crops tend to be the kind you can plant and forget about completely until you need to harvest them.  Like rhubarb and raspberries. 

Our salad contained lettuce and spinach leaves.

The "other" salad toppings were all things she had in her fridge and cupboards, including: apples, sunflower seeds, cheese, carrots, green olives, croutons, and craisins. 

Ironically, it was the most traditional of these toppings, the carrots, that were largely ignored by the 8 of us.  We also thought the turntable, known as a "lazy susan", which belonged to our mother, would be really cute and handy, but in reality the 3 people farthest from it still ended up stretching and passing our plates down, because once all the toppings were piled on we did not want to risk moving the whole lazy susan up the table.  Perhaps we should have started with it in the middle.  But we didn't.

The chicken is on the bottom, in case you were wondering

In addition to chicken salad, which was fantastic, she served fresh, locally grown corn on the cob.  My sister lives in Amish Pennsylvania, "Dutch Country", and there are many local farmers with corn for sale.  She bought 18 ears for $6.  We ate almost all of it.

The green things in the ends of the corn are a fast-cooling plastic that screws into the cobs, making them less likely to fall out, and the corn much easier to serve.  I've never seen them before but apparently they are sold somewhere.

Dessert was ice cream cones using up the last of some ice cream my sister had frozen a while ago, and some brand-new Keebler waffle cones.  She told me she had no idea how much they cost but I googled them and you can buy 12 cones here for $4.65.  We had 8 cones, for $3.10, assuming similar prices.  Since I buy ice cream for $2.50 to $3.00 a carton, and we used probably one whole container (among the several mostly empty containers which we cleaned out - really, I was doing her a favor, eating up leftovers like that)

And so, our total for 8 people was: $3.75 chicken, free lettuce, $6 corn, $3.10 cones + $3 ice cream, + toppings for salad.  My total allowance for 4 people is $10; we fed 8 people so I'd give a $20 allowance.  That means we could have spent $4.15 on salad toppings and been ok. 

I, personally, think we probably cut it close but this was delicious.