Chicken Salad and Coffee Mud Pie à la Cork ‘N Cleaver
Someday I’ll tell my grandkids that back in the day I drove a car (with an internal combustion engine no doubt) 40 minutes to an office building every Monday through Friday and worked in a cubicle all day. Maybe that already dates me, but it pretty much describes my early corporate career. I worked in public relations for a big tech company back when out-of-town editors would visit and it was our job to treat them to fancy lunches (and wine in the middle of the day). Discovering all the nice restaurants on an expense account in Phoenix and Scottsdale was definitely a perk of the PR job. Working for a large company also meant lots of coworkers’ birthdays to celebrate with team lunches. Cork 'N Cleaver was the default birthday restaurant in the 90s for my department. A group of us ladies always ordered the same thing: chicken salad that came with banana bread and a big piece of shareable mud pie with an uninhibited round of happy birthday.
Chicken Avocado Melt with Black Bean & Corn Salsa
Chicken. It’s what’s for dinner more often than any other meat in the United States. Over the years, this has been true at our house as well. We’ve never been big fans of pork. (Well except for bacon, because duh, it’s bacon.) We’ve limited our red meat intake and eaten more seafood ever since moving back to the Pacific Northwest. But chicken remains a staple. It’s easy to defrost and lends itself to so many different recipes. These days I look for high-quality, pastured chicken with local being even better. I’ve also been seeing air-chilled chicken more often at my local grocer. I buy it on sale and then we divide it up and vacuum seal into dinner portions for easy defrosting. There are so many ways to cook chicken, yet I’m always looking for new ideas. Once or twice a year, I pull the recipe for Chicken Avocado Melt out of my archives. It remains one of my husband’s favorite dinners. I recently served this topped with a black bean and corn salsa and a side of cilantro lime rice with candied cumin. ¡Fiesta!