Friday: Focaccia Leftovers, Ground Chicken Experiment & Dinner Out

We got up this morning and finished off the rest of the bacon I made earlier this week. So the bacon is officially gone, which means we’ll be making weekend bacon.

The kids had toast and other quick breakfast things, and two of my kiddos went with my parents to Mass and breakfast. That left me at home with a slightly smaller crew, so we got going on schoolwork for the morning.

For a late morning snack my 4 year old wanted a ‘sandwich’…which basically means she wants to eat salami and cheese and use bread as a transportation device.

Lunch: One Last Appearance from the Focaccia Pizza

Believe it or not, we STILL had a little bit of focaccia pizza left.

I reheated the last of it for lunch, but there wasn’t quite enough to call that lunch for everybody. So I pulled some of my cooked ground beef out of the freezer.

This is exactly why I keep plain cooked ground beef frozen flat in bags. It can become basically anything.

Today I warmed it up with some Rao’s marinara from Costco, cooked a little pasta, and suddenly we had a second option to go alongside the pizza. Add some fruit and veggies, and lunch was done.

I also used up most of the remaining grilled chicken in one of my usual throw-everything-in-a-bowl salads with some barbecue sauce.

For the Sake of Science: Chicken Sticks

This afternoon I started an experiment.

You guys have LOVED the homemade beef sticks, and one of the questions I’ve gotten over and over again is:

Can I make these with ground chicken?

I don’t particularly love ground chicken, but I do it for you guys. For the sake of science, I bought some.

For this first test, I’m essentially following the same formula as my beef sticks:

Ground Chicken Stick Test Batch

• 1 pound ground chicken
• 2 tsp Morton Tender Quick
• ½ Tbsp dried chopped/minced onion
• ½ Tbsp liquid smoke
• ½ Tbsp granulated sugar
• ½ tsp garlic powder
• ½ tsp smoked paprika
• ¾–1 tsp coarse black pepper

I mixed everything really well, put the mixture between two sheets of parchment paper and rolled it very thin. Then I scored it into strips with my bench scraper, just like I do with the beef version.

And immediately I noticed a difference.

Ground chicken is STICKY.

When I peeled that top piece of parchment away, it really wanted to hang on.

If this recipe works and I do another round, I think I’d try spritzing the parchment with the tiniest bit of oil before rolling. Not enough to make everything greasy, just enough to help that parchment release more cleanly.

But we’ll see.

Right now, it’s scored and sitting in my refrigerator to cure overnight. Tomorrow I’ll bake it and we’ll find out whether homemade chicken sticks are actually worth making.

You Kitchen Log readers get the sneak peek before I know whether this experiment is even successful.

Dinner Out

And then tonight I did absolutely no cooking.

Our co-op very sweetly gave me a gift card at the end of last school year, and we finally used it tonight for dinner at Silver Spring House.

It’s such a fun place to take the kids because it’s that indoor-outdoor restaurant atmosphere, and they have free popcorn and peanuts, which obviously makes any restaurant approximately 75 percent more exciting when you’re a kid.

My favorite order there is the chicken with a sweet potato and broccoli. Simple, but so good.

And after a week of getting back into schoolwork and spending yesterday setting up our new co-op facility, I was very happy to let someone else make dinner…even though Daphne didn’t want to sit still in her chair.

Going into tomorrow, we have some leftovers from dinner tonight, some of the ground beef I pulled from the freezer today, and a refrigerator that’s definitely ready for a restock.

So I have a feeling Costco is happening tomorrow morning.

And, most importantly, tomorrow we find out whether the chicken sticks worked.