For tea we did nachos with beef fajita, all served with salad.
I use a box pack for the nachos, just adding cheese before baking in the oven.
For the salad I made a nice mixed salad with butternut squash, sliced radish and artichokes.
Butternut Squash Salad
I do quite like making salads using a range of ingredients. Even as it gets colder I do like a salad either as a meal in itself or as an accompaniment to something else.
This was a recent tasty salad that I made using butternut squash. I cut up the butternut squash into chunks and roasted in the oven with some olive oil.
Once this was cooked I constructed the salad. I started off with a bed of mixed leaves. I quite like butterhead lettuce you can get from various supermarkets, or the rosa verde salad bag from M&S.
To this I add cubes of cucumber, sliced tomato, slices of red pepper, sweetcorn, pomegranate seeds, mozzarella, thinly sliced radish and Serrano ham. I also used a nut and seed mix from Aldi to add some crunch.
You can dress the salad with a dressing, sometimes I do a simple French dressing, sometimes I let the natural flavours work their magic.
Little salad bowls
With this beautiful hot weather we have been eating a lot of salad. Recently I have been plating up salads for people using individual tapas style bowls. These I “picked up” from Lidl in their Sol Mar Spanish Tapas dishes in the freezer, which come with some useful little brown tapas dishes.
The advantage of these over plating onto the main plates is that they take up less room and it’s easier from a portion control perspective. The advantage of merely creating one big salad is that in the family some people like some salad items and others prefer something else. I like tomatoes, but another member of the family prefers grapes in their salad.
Depending on what we have in the fridge and the cupboard will determine what goes into the individual salad bowls.
I quite like to add a base layer of houmus to mine, to which I then add a handful of mixed lettuce leaves. I add slices of “heritage” tomatoes, slices of radish, sliced pepper, pomegranate seeds and diced cucumber.
Other ingredients I have used include batons of cucumber, grapes, sweetcorn, mixed pulses, sometimes raw red onion.
I rarely add dressing, but if I do, usually I just add a drizzle of olive oil and some white wine vinegar.
Chicken with Turmeric and Rosemary
I have recently been eating a lot more salad and the other day I was looking for something to have with my salad.
At my local Aldi in the specials section of the chilled products was a pack of chicken fillets that was “coated” in a turmeric and rosemary marinade. This sounded quite interesting and looked nice.
To cook them I put them on wooden skewers and grilled them under a hot grill.
They looked nice, but lacked the intensity of flavour I had been expecting.
I served the chicken with a salad dressed with sliced radish, torn mozzarella, a seed mix, diced cucumber and avocado. I trickled the salad with extra virgin olive oil.