Schmaltzy Croutons

I am not a big kitchen gear person, and yet, if I’m not careful, I can end up with a thousand knives and stirring spoons and pots and bowls on my counter after making the simplest dinner, resulting in some epic, soul-crushing clean-ups. Somewhere along the line, I decided that my little Victorinox serrated knife was the only knife for chopping tomatoes, and my 8-inch chef knife is the only one for slicing an avocado, when really, if I weren’t such a princess, the serrated knife could absolutely do both jobs on nights I’m prepping both. So since last March, when my kitchen (and yours, presumably) turned into an all-hours diner, I’ve been more mindful about what I’m pulling out of drawers and cabinets. If I’m tossing vegetables in olive oil in a large mixing bowl, can I just use that large bowl for serving the salad? That jam jar containing a tiny bit of leftover homemade vinaigrette — can’t I just build on what’s there to make a different vinaigrette instead of dirtying a whole new jar? Do I even need to rinse the cast-iron skillet after lunch since I’ll probably use it again at dinner?

As Glennon Doyle* would remind me: I CAN DO HARD THINGS!

That’s how I ended up discovering these croutons. After roasting chicken legs (which would be shredded and tossed into a salad), I was about to take out another sheet pan to bake some croutons when my new mindfulness kicked in. What if I just roasted the croutons on the same baking sheet, in the sheen of fat that dripped off the chicken? I’d save myself a pan to wash, and croutons baked in chicken fat? As my husband would say “It’s not like it’s gonna be bad.”

He was correct of course. It is here when I call up this sentence I wrote for Real Simple in 2002: “It’s just the thing to take a meal from ho-hum to how nice!” (In the margin, I got a “LOVE!” from my favorite editor, which is why I always remember it. Hi Tom!)

Note: The salad is the most basic supermarket-bagged romaine, grape tomatoes, avocado, chives, minced red onion, croutons, with a vegan Caesar dressing from my next book. (I realize vegan Caesar drizzled on chicken pieces makes exactly zero sense.) So you can see: There was a lot of pressure on those croutons to deliver, but they did.

*worth a New Yorker subscription to read Ariel Levy’s profile of Glennon Doyle this week

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the recipe for the croutons (among other things) and to get all my new posts delivered straight to your inbox.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

What is 11 + 8 ?
Please leave these two fields as-is:
IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-)