An accidental, left-over chicken salad

Sometimes I just have a day when I’m totally disorganised. Work is crazy, the kids no less so when I get home so that once 8:30 rolls around and the little ones are in bed, I haven’t really given any thought to what we’re going to eat before crashing into bed. When that happens, I tend to look in the fridge and see where I can find some inspiration.

The beginning of the week usually offers more choices. We tend to have guests in over the weekend and therefore there is usually some leftover or another sitting in tupperware around which a meal can be based. Usually I’m pretty good at this game – my chicken curry recipe is a classic example. I was just so tired the other day however that I simply pulled out some vegetables and started chopping – tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and onions – add fresh parsley, mint if you’re feeling adventurous, lemon, olive oil and salt and pepper and you have an Israeli salad. Before I got that far however, the boss came down and pulled some roasted zucchini cubes and a bag of baby leaves out of the fridge as an addition – as she washed and dried them I took another look and found a chicken leg quarter which I set to work pulling the meat off and cutting into bite-sized chunks.

Many people have a preference for chicken breast over legs. Thigh and leg meat is a little fattier and therefore doesn’t dry out as easily whilst it’s being cooked and as a result I tend to prefer it over chicken breast. I also leave the skin on as it’s also very flavourful – my favourite part of the chicken to be honest. If you’re watching your weight then by all means use breasts but be careful to avoid over-cooking them.

We even happened to have some left over dressing from the weekend so I didn’t have to bother making that. Whatever your favourite dressing combo would probably work quite well with this mix.

Ingredients

2 tomatoes, diced

1 medium cucumber, diced

1/2 medium or 1 small red onion diced

1 small red or yellow pepper, diced

2 handfuls of baby salad leaves or any other sort of lettuce mixture, washed and dried

1 leftover chicken leg quarter, meat pulled off the bone and cut into bite sized pieces – any other part of the chicken would also be fine.

Method

Once the chopping’s done all you need do is mix everything together, dress and divide onto plates.

If you want to be a bit fancy, add some herbs and / or toasted nuts. If you’re tired and don’t need to impress anyone then this is fine as is!

Although this was made before Pesach there’s nothing in it which is problematic for the chag.