This is now my favourite way to use up left over chicken. The most delicious part of the recipe is the dressing – crunchy (or smooth if you prefer) peanut butter diluted with a little warm water, with chillies, generous amounts of fresh ginger, garlic, soy sauce, honey and loads of lime juice. Really, really…
Category: Salads
Roast fennel salad
I think fennel has gone to the top of my list of favourite vegetables (nudging courgettes and then runner beans into second and third place respectively). I can’t seem to get enough of fennel at the moment. I’ve been making a traybake most nights for dinner at the moment to save time on cooking. This…
Tabouleh with chargrilled aubergines and peppers
The base for this tabouleh is a mix of grains – bulgar, freekah and white and red quinoa (bought as one mixed pack from Sainsbury’s) but a more traditional tabouleh would just use bulgar wheat. My idea of a good tabouleh is to pack it with loads of fresh mint and parsley – in this…
Cobb salad
I’ve just come back from a few days away on the coast in Deal in Kent, spending time with my son and meeting up with my daughter who lives nearby in Canterbury. On the first day we went to Broadstairs, to Botany Bay, as the weather was lovely. We were starving after spending time on…
Chargrilled baby gem lettuce
I’m always trying to avoid food waste but so often I don’t succeed and I get very annoyed with myself. Just this evening I threw out half a big bag of spinach I’d completely forgotten about – the spinach was way too yellow to salvage. And I’m always finding bags of soggy and yellowing bags…
Pasta salad
This is a pasta salad I made just before the lockdown restrictions came into force – which seems like forever now, but it’s only actually about two weeks ago. At the time there was a wave of panic buying and I was having real trouble finding anything in the shops. Things have calmed down a…
Smoked fish salad
With the World Cup in full swing my current priority is to get straight down to watching TV as soon as I get home from work, so cooking has taken a bit of a back seat. I have a few home frozen meals for easy prep – some turkey and sweetcorn meatballs eaten cold with…
Roasted beetroot, orange and feta salad
Beetroot is one of those vegetables people either love or hate. Roasting beetroot in olive oil and sea salt is completely different to eating tiny balls of vacuum packed beetroot soaked in vinegar. So if you have negative experiences of beetroot please give this roasted recipe a go. Beetroot provides a big flash of colour…
Puy lentils with anchovies and toasted pine nuts
I always keep Puy lentils in the cupboard and much prefer them for salads than green or brown lentils which I use for cooked lentil recipes like vegetarian shepherd’s pie. Puy lentils go very well with anchovies and toasted pine nuts and I’ve just added some hard boiled eggs in this recipe for a more…
Chicken Caesar salad
I love Caesar salad and I love its origins. A quick look on Wikipedia attributes the salad to Caesar Cardini, an Italian immigrant who owned restaurants in the US and Mexico in the early part of the last century. The salad was invented in 1924 when a Fourth of July rush depleted the kitchen supplies…
Cheap, fresh and easy 