Corporate leftovers

As a corporate worker bee by day, one of my duties is event planning--which means I get to order the food for big meetings. Which means there are usually a lot of leftovers. Which means I get first dibs at the leftovers. Which means my husband and I are eating from corporate-sized tubs of salad and trays of chicken fairly often.

I have no shame about hauling tubs of salad and giant plastic sandwich trays out to my car at the end of the day. Why would I? That's perfectly good food (well, we could debate "good" in many instances, but that's beside the point) that would otherwise get thrown out. Waste makes me grind my teeth--the plastic trays alone start the grinding process--and, hello, free food.

Case in point: last week, during a series of big meetings, I ended up with most of a make-your-own-gyro platter (takeaway: pita bread, roast beef, chicken, sliced tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers, olives, roasted red peppers, and that yummy cucumber-dill sauce), a tub of salad, and a handful of fresh mint they'd used to garnish the fruit platter. (Hey, that was perfectly good mint.)

The roast beef, chicken and pita bread became sandwiches, and the veggies and olives graced the lettuce from the salad tub and became salads. The mint joined a handful of my home-grown mint for a bowl of tabbouleh later in the week. Easily a day's worth of food for two adults. (I also commandeered a bottle each of OJ and cranberry juice.)

The next day, I got a tray of chicken and another half-tub of salad.

Needless to say, my husband and I have been eating a lot of salads. But that's okay--a nice salad, with some chicken, feta cheese, maybe some pecans, and homemade croutons is pretty much the perfect summer meal.

More excitement with leftover chicken tomorrow.