Chicken and Pasta Salad
What the hell is with the weather lately?! Miserable over the weekend, gloriously sunny and warm during the week. That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.
I'm actually at work, gazing longingly throught the skylight to the clear blue, cloudless infinity beyond. Who wants to talk about boring old toll roads when there's such weather to be enjoyed?!
What I wouldn't give to be stretched out on the grass or the beach with a good book (I've just bought a Bill Bryson book on the English language!)
Anyway, there is no escape from this work-a-day world so I must content myself with sitting at this poorly decorated desk and fantasising about summery foods (despite the fact there there is a good month and a bit of Spring left.)
There are so many beautiful foods that say Summer to me. Just about any sort of barbeque, tomato, cucumber and mint salad, cold bacon and egg pies...the list is endless and delicious.
One of my favourite things to eat when I'm pining for the outdoors is pasta salad.
Just to appease my mum I ought to point out that this is not the gluggy supermarket pasta salad in creamy sauce (though it is one of my guilty pleasures), this is proper pasta salad with a proper dressing.
Because I usually make it when I'm exhausted I start with a BBQ chicken from the supermarket. What could be nicer? Stripping all the chicken off the carcass is very cathartic and I get to eat the delicious skin...sometimes I even share it with Michael, but then he's more of a stuffing man.
Chuck all the flaked chicken into a big bowl and start adding things like mushrooms, cucumber, capsicum, radishes, salad onion, cherry tomatoes (amazingly sweet at this time of the year), snow peas and avocado. These obviously should be chopped or sliced how you like them.
Yesterday at the supermarket they had no Lebanese cucumbers so for the first time I had to buy a Continental one. Ugh! The skin's so thick. Now I know why Mum never buys them. Lebanese cucumbers are the only ones to use.
While you're chopping your vegetables cook some pasta (spirals are good). With everything else in the salad you'll probably only need 250g.
Add 50g of fresh baby spinach leaves and pour the hot pasta (drained, of course) over the top of everything.
Dress with salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and sweet grainy mustard. Trust me, the mustard makes the dressing. Toss everything together and let it sit for 10 minutes or so. The dressing and the heat of the pasta will soften/cook the spinach and mushrooms somewhat so they're nice and soft and delicious.
Then you eat!
Ah, so good. So satisfying. So summery!
The one thing that I've learned from this exercise is that I need a bigger salad bowl or I need to put less in my salad. The bowl I have was big enough but when it came to tossing it, I couldn't. I had to tip everything into our big saucepan.
That aside, it's a perfect meal. It has everything and leaves you wanting for nothing.
I'm going to sit here and pray that there are some of last night's leftovers still uneaten when I get home.