Buffalo Chicken Salad (With Celery Leaves!)

The worst week of my life was the week I spent at sleep-away camp. I should have loved it. I was about 12, and two of my friends and I decided to spend one week of our summer break in a cabin at a Christian camp in the mountains.

The counselors were cool (one of the counselors in my cabin even had red hair, which only made me love her more). We sang fun songs, we did arts and crafts, and camp was right on a lake. It sounds like a great time, doesn't it?

Well, it wasn't.

I know, I know, plenty of kids think camp is great. My brother was one of them. Although my parents didn't send him to the same camp, he loved sleepover camp. He went more than one summer.

Momma apparently didn't cry when she dropped him off.

Note to parents: Don't cry when you leave your kid at sleepover camp for the first time. She will hate it. She will smile when you send her mail and she gets to kiss the moose, but she will cry every night at dinner, impatiently awaiting Saturday morning when she knows she will get to go home.

I learned that week that loving Jesus is good, leaving your first-born child at sleep-away camp is hard and wasting food is bad.

The husband and I don't waste a lot of food. We may eat leftovers for longer than we should, and, yes, I sometimes encourage him to drink milk past its expiration date so long as it doesn't smell funky. But we rarely make so much food that leftovers end up in the trash, and I'm pretty good at putting food items to work in as many ways as possible (beer can chicken carcass equals homemade chicken stock).

But there's just one exception to that rule: celery leaves.

Just about every morning when I'm making my lunch, I slice the tops off a couple of celery stalks, toss them in the trash and cut up the remaining stalk to pair with my string cheese. I never think twice about those celery leaves. Or, I should say, I never thought twice about those celery leaves.

It occurred to me that I love celery and blue cheese, and I love blue cheese and Buffalo sauce, and I love Buffalo sauce with cream cheese, so if I pair cream cheese and Buffalo sauce together, couldn't I find a way to use celery, too?


Seriously, that is how my brain works.


So I did it, and it worked. No more wasted celery leaves here! Maybe that week at camp wasn't the worst week of my life, seeing as how it taught me to be as resourceful as possible.


Never mind. It totally was the worst week ever.