On a Saturday afternoon, I grabbed a chicken Caesar salad for lunch from a nearby grab-and-go case. I figured I’d toss it into the fridge, to hopefully finish at a later time. The sun set and dinnertime rolled around, and I perused the fridge for dinner. I regretted not buying something additional at the store, and didn’t have much to piece together. I looked at the Caesar salad, likely to end its life wilted in the back of my fridge, and decided not to let it go to waste.
I grabbed the shredded cheese along with the salad. I tossed the chicken Caesar salad in a mixing bowl with some chopped red onion, and the extra packet of dressing I got when I purchased it. This salad did not have croutons, but if it did I would have picked them out, because they would have likely been soggy by this point.
I warmed up a large pan to medium heat, and placed a flour burrito-size tortilla in the bottom flat and sprinkled with cheese. As the cheese melted, I scooped the Caesar salad into a mound on the tortilla, I let it sit for about a minute and pulled the flat, open tortilla onto a cutting board. This part can be tricky, so I pretended I was the guy at the burrito place, and mimicked the way he rolls a burrito. I quickly folded the left and right sides in, tucked the edge closest to me into the tortilla on the far side, and rolled. Then I placed it back into the hot pan to make sure it was seared closed.
There it was, a chicken Caesar wrap. The salad inside was warm, but not wilted and bitter. The thick romaine left a little crunch, and the cheese was the glue holding the lightly browned crispy shell together.
It was a fabulous way to finish leftovers that might have gone bad otherwise, and it tasted like a completely different meal than the Caesar salad I had for lunch. An added bonus, I didn’t have to go back out to get something to have for dinner.
