Les Bonnes Choses

I have, on occasion, used my blog as a recipe repository. I had some difficulty finding the first such entry -- a recipe for Stroganbuddies, possibly because google tries to avoid indexing nonsense words. I did manage to find it, and my meal is coming along nicely. While I am on the topic, I'll post another recipe which I cooked up some time in December when I was about to drive back to London for the holidays and trying to figure out what to do with a head of lettuce, a tomato and a stale loaf of bread. The answer: deconstructed clubhouse sandwich! It sounds fancy, but it's pretty damn easy to make.

• 1 boneless, skinless Chicken breast, cooked (or an equivalent amount of leftover chicken)


• 1 head of lettuce that will go bad if you can't figure out what to do with it


• 2? 3? strips of bacon. I've considered joining the bacon of the month club, so I'd consider using a whole pound of the stuff


• 1 tomato


• 1 red onion


• 1/2 loaf of stale french or italian bread. If it wasn't stale, you'd just make the damn sandwich. As it is, the bread is going to become...

Croutons! First, fry up the bacon in a large sautee pan. Set it aside, but keep the grease. Next, cut the bread into cubes. Fry the cubes in the sautee pan until they start to brown, then remove them to a cookie sheet, and pop those bad boys into a 350 degree oven to toast them up.

While the croutons are coming along, tear the lettuce up into your salad bowl. Slice your tomato, onion, and chicken and chop up the cooked bacon and add those guys to the lettuce. Eight minutes in the oven should for the croutons should be good, I would think. Pull them out and add to your salad bowl. Now all we need is some kind of dressing. I honestly can't remember what I did for a dressing, but I don't think it matters that much because the rest of the salad is going to rock. I suppose if you wanted to be really anal about deconstructing a club sandwich, your dressing should have some kind of mayonnaise base. You'll have to look that up for yourself though because I only do vinaigrettes. I likely made up a balsamic vinaigrette and it all turned out just fine.