Orange Chicken And Chicken Salad Sandwiches

Megan and I love making big dinners, but we don't love big shopping bills, so to save money during our weekly grocery store run we base our cooking around what's on sale (shopping at multiple stores to get the best deals), and we try to plan meals that utilize several of the same ingredients (for more keeping ingredients grouped together, check out our original post on interconnecting meals here).

Recently we put together a staple in our kitchen - the whole chicken - and then used the leftovers to make homemade chicken salad.  Normally we like to bake whole chicken with a butter and herb mixture, but after trying a pineapple pork roast with sweet pineapple flavors, this time we mixed up our recipe by making orange chicken.

The best method we've found for getting flavor mixed all throughout a whole chicken is to slide your fingers underneath the skin and pull it up from the meat, so that seasonings can be added inbetween the skin and meat. Here we've pulled up the skin and Megan is starting to rub our seasoning mixture inside the chicken.

For this chicken's seasonings, we mixed together orange juice concentrate, teriyaki sauce, onion and garlic powder, and ghost pepper salt.  Our friend Cristal bought us this spicy salt concoction as a gift a year or so back and it's since become a normal part of our seasoning cabinet. If your local grocery store doesn't stock it, there are many spice websites that carry it, and you can even find a few varieties on websites like Amazon.com.

After being thoroughly rubbed down inside and out, the skin is pressed back down and the chicken is tied up with kitchen twine to keep all the juices inside, ensuring the chicken cooks well and the meat remains tender.

For an added level of flavor, and to keep the meat incredibly moist and tender, we also injected some of the seasoning mixture, mixed with melted butter, directly into the meat. For more info on ways to inject meat with amazing flavors, check out our smoky raspberry BBQ beef ribs or pork baby back ribs.

Before getting popped into the oven, the remaining injection sauce is brushed all over the skin so there isn't a single part of the chicken that won't be bursting with orange flavor.

Our handy meat thermometer gets popped into a deep portion of the chicken breast and the whole guy gets baked for about an hour and 20 minutes.

And here's the end result: a perfectly baked, perfectly seasoned chicken that is all tender and flavorful meat through and through.

After carving up the chicken, I'm getting ready to dig into a drumstick along with our sides for the evening: some brown rice cooked in chicken stock, and a side salad with tomato, green onions, and thousand island dressing.

Obviously we didn't eat the entire chicken that night however, as plenty of it ended up as leftovers. Besides just having a heated up plate of the delicious chicken for another meal, we also carved the remaining meat off the bone and mixed it with the buffalo sauce injected chicken thighs from "the Insani-Which" to make our own chicken salad. Here you can see the orange chicken, the buffalo chicken, and some of the leftover bacon from the Insani-Which.

The chicken and bacon gets finely diced up and thrown together, so there's a great mix of sweet, spicy, and savory going on in that bowl. To turn the chicken into sandwich spread, we added in mayo, dijon mustard, and a few seasonings.  Just about any seasonings work here, but I prefer pepper and oregano. If you like it spicy, toss in a bit of hot sauce as well.

Here's the chicken salad all mixed together, ready to hit a delicious sesame seed bun to create a gourmet sandwich worthy of any restaurant lunch menu.

Here I've got two slices of tomato and some lettuce. If you look close you can also see an interesting addition hiding under the tomato: a few fritos! These add a bit of crunch and some saltiness to the sandwich. Kettle cooked chips also work fantastic in this capacity.

I've put a few spoonfuls of the chicken salad mixture over the lettuce as the sandwich is nearing completion.

Finishing off my perfect sandwich is a handful of shredded cheese. You can also throw on another dash of pepper or oregano here as well.

And the sandwich is now complete and ready to be eaten! The flavor injected chicken creates a sandwich you can't get with store-bought canned chicken salad.

Thanks for checking out our latest blog, and hopefully we've inspired you to try out some new things in your own kitchen. Coming soon at Six-Seven-Eight will be more ways to connect meals to save on your grocery bills, additional articles on making fantastic barbecued ribs, and detailed instructions on how to make amazing potato salads that mix unexpected ingredients for absolutely delicious results.