Leftover Roast Chicken Fritters (for lack of a better name)

Our next, delicious, and completely uncreative application for our leftover chicken was club sandwiches. Chicken, toasted Italian bread, lettuce, mayonnaise, and some bacon. It's very hard to start out with those ingredients and end up with something that's not good. Of course, we once would have said the same about bagels, cream cheese, and butter. Then the creative cook at an unnamed English restaurant toasted our bagels in the same oil he was using to make fish and chips. It was an ingenious—if entirely unsuccessful—example of cross-product usage.

But you don't need us to tell you how to make a club sandwich. Instead, we'll take the leftover roast chicken in a slightly different direction. This tasty little appetizer is very hard to write a recipe for, since we don't know the state of your roast chicken (done to a turn, underdone in some places, or massacred). We also don't know your spice rub (though we're betting you didn't slather it in Thai spices, like our sister's boyfriend). And we don't know how much you have. But the principles are what counts.

Chicken Fritters

1 ½ cup leftover roast chicken, shredded, chopped, and shredded again
2 stalk celery, peeled and diced
1 tsp lemon juice
Bread, several slices, soaked in milk
Bread crumbs or crumbled crackers
1 tbsp sweet paprika
½ tbsp garlic powder
½ tbsp sumac
½ tbsp oregano or Italian seasoning
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1 large egg
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

1. Combine the chicken, celery, lemon juice, parsley, and spices, along with a pinch of salt and several grindings of pepper.
2. Squeeze the bread to remove most of the milk, and add to mixture.
3. Add one egg and mash together with your hands.
4. See where you're at. You want the mixture to have the consistency of a meatball. Likely it will be too wet at this stage, so you'll want to add bread crumbs or crumbled crackers. Eventually, it should hold together well enough to make a small ball that doesn't stick to your hands.
5. Heat a pan and make a tiny patty. Fry it quickly and taste. Then make adjustments to mix for seasoning.
6. Make patties by first rolling into a ball slightly larger than a walnut, and then flattening.
7. Fry in olive oil until golden on both sides.
8. Serve with a sauce of your choosing (our favorite simple sauce these days is equal parts water and sour cream, with a nice bit of chopped dill, some sumac, and a little lemon juice).