Good Taste: Roasted Chicken (or leftover turkey) Salad

I love this salad, because, as far as salads go, it's kind of cozy for the winter months. And this will be a very good next home for the leftover turkey, if there is any. Our leftovers last maybe 24 hours after the big meal. This makes quite a bit, so I often cut the recipe in half.

1 cup pecan halves (about 3 ounces), broken in half lengthwise

1 whole roasted chicken (about three pounds), skin removed

8 scallions, white and light-green parts only, trimmed and thinly sliced

2 stalks celery, strings removed and thinly sliced

2 Fuji apples, cored and sliced into bite-size pieces

5 tablespoons golden or dark raisins

1 tablespoon coarsely chopped fresh oregano leaves

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Sour Cream Dressing (recipe follows)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spread pecans in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet.  Toast in oven until fragrant, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.  Remove from pan; let cool completely.  [this step may seem unnecessary, but it really does make the pecans taste fancy.  It's worth it!]

2. Pull chicken from the bone; discard bones, and cut meat into 3/4-inch pieces.  Transfer to a medium bolw; add scallions, celery, apples, raisins, and oregano.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add dressing; toss to combine.  Chill, covered, until ready to serve.  

Sour Cream Dressing:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons sour cream

1/4 cup cider vinegar

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

In a small bowl, whisk together the mayo, sour cream, and vinegar; season with salt and pepper.  Refrigerate, covered, until ready to use, up to 4 days.

Field Trip: Stanford

We recently spent the month in Palo Alto, while Shane did an away rotation at Stanford. I was excited to check out the campus; I really expected Palo Alto to be an extension of the East Coast.  Before I came to New Haven, I just assumed that Stanford was an Ivy League school, especially since I didn't know that the Ivy League was a college sports division.  You know, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, right?  Wrong!  Stanford is in California, and carries its western heritage with it in the most remarkable way.  The entire campus is built in the Mission Style, brought from the Spanish missionaries to California all those years ago.  The campus is free from all street traffic, with long arcades, quiet, contemplative students walking about, and the pipe organ's song  floating through the church windows. This seemed to be a perfectly cloistered environment, like a modern-day monastery.  I, being one who gets slightly obsessed with nuns and monks, was totally loving Stanford's monastic-feeling campus.  Here are some pics:

definitely not in New England anymore...








I loved many windows on campus, but I thought that this is a window someone could actually incorporate into a real house. Just keeping this picture in my back pocket, in case I could use it someday. And do you see the lights inside? perfect for those Stanford book worms.

I was also delighted to see the Rodin sculpture garden on campus. Well, as delighted as one can be when viewing The Gates of Hell.  It was cool to see, let's just say that. I wonder if Rodin would have felt so tormented if he lived here in sunny California.  Maybe he would have just settled with The Gates of Feeling Less Happy than Usual.  Anyway, this is the largest Rodin collection outside of Paris and had the entire Gates of Hell structure for our viewing pleasure.  This project was intended to be the doors to a museum that, in the end, were never built, so the project remains an orphan of sorts, not being used as it was intended. However, many of Rodin's most famous works are actually larger casts of smaller figures from the gates.  For instance, does anyone recognize the ponderous man just about the door?

"Hmmmm...let me think about that."
Here it is.  Adam and Eve flank the sides.

Here are a few sculptural studies on display.  Pete's trying to recreate the pose.
larger view of the garden.  I like those cool cypress trees.
Here you can get a sense for the full use of three dimensions in the gates.
Pete, feeling a little overdressed with the Three Shades.






There were also sculptures from the The Burghers of Callais sculptural program, including this giant head.  When I asked Pete how the head was feeling, he said he looked "worried."  Indeed.