Family picnic and cast free for a year

In the ICONIC words of Britney…

Oops, I did it again.

This salad is perfection.

This time I used dino kale, curly kale, AND red cabbage.  I gave it a prelim toss in Nugget’s Thai sesame dressing, and then added the rest after making the salad so that the chicken tenders and avo would get coated in dressing too.

I bought two huge boxes of breaded chicken at the store – one box has dinosaur shaped nuggets and the other has tenders.  I figured the tenders were the more adult choice.  😉

I ate lots of carrots while snacking, but added some into the bowl too.

This salad hit the spot. And don’t worry, in addition to buying way too many nuggets, I also bought another bottle of dressing.  So prepare to see this salad at least 4 more times (that’s usually how many servings per bottle I get).

More salad news.  This recipe is from the “Just Add Sauce” cookbook.  I thought it would be a great thing to bring to the Fall family picnic for Kyle and me (I packed dumplings for the kids).  Please note the recipe suggests that it serves 4-6 and yet I made it for TWO.  That’s about right.

I couldn’t find escarole, so I subbed mustard greens and dino kale.

And since I was already prepping those greens, I figured I may as well do the rest of the kale I bought at the same time.

The dressing for the salad is a warm mustard pistachio vinaigrette which is sweetened with dried apricots.  Rather than leave the dried fruit and shallots chopped, I pureed it with the immersion blender before adding the oil.  Such a unique dressing.

Look what I FOUND again!  Trader Joe’s finally began carrying the Pasture of Eden feta again.  Happy dance!

I waited til the very end to add the toasted pistachios so that they would stay crunchy.  And as you can see, I went extra big with the feta. 🙂

It was a late night (with dessert and tv), but OMG it was sooooo fun.  I love her school and our community.

She feels like such a big girl now that she goes to school there, but he is just as pleased because half of her class is younger siblings of his friends, which means he gets to see his buddies more frequently too.

PS this picnic was the one year anniversary of V getting her cast off.