Forever Summer (18 page)

Serves 2–3.

CAESAR CLEOPATRA

This is what I call – after a menu in the food court of an LA shopping mall – a Caesar salad with chicken in it. Best of all the chicken will have been grilled or griddled before being roughly shredded for the salad, but it’s not obligatory. Since I seem to spend half my life teetering on the edge of a low-carbohydrate diet, I never put croutons in a Caesar salad (no hardship: I don’t like them much anyway), but this is rather wonderful with the avocado. Yes, I know that once you’ve added chicken and avocado and dispensed with the croûtons and, as I also seem to have done, the anchovies, this is has absolutely no right at all calling itself any sort of Caesar salad, but you don’t get to give a recipe a name like this that often, and I’m not passing it up now.

Of course, if you quite properly want to add anchovy, then just pound one soaked and drained salt-preserved little fish to a mush with the egg yolk when you start making the dressing – which again does not quite follow the normal procedures but does a very good job of its own; the chicken, after all, makes for a heavier salad, which requires in turn, a more creamily emulsified dressing.

2 cos lettuce hearts or 1 cos lettuce

1 egg yolk

2–3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

juice of half a smallish lemon

few drops Lea & Perrins

3 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan

1 cold, cooked chicken breast, preferably grilled

half an avocado (optional)

Tear the lettuce into large chunks and arrange on a plate. Mix up the dressing by whisking the egg yolk in a bowl and carry on whisking as you add the oil slowly. Whisk again adding the lemon juice and Lea & Perrins and pour over the lettuce, then toss well, preferably with your hands, so that all the leaves are coated. Sprinkle over 2 tablespoons of the parmesan and toss again. Cut the chicken into fat strips and add to the salad, along with the sliced avocado half, if you’re using it. Toss again, then sprinkle over the final tablespoon of parmesan.

Serves 2.

CHICKEN SALAD WITH SPINACH AND LARDONS

When I was a wee young thing, the spinach and lardons salad in Joe Allen’s was considered quite the coolest thing – and I still love it, indeed love all those outdated, unfairly derided
salades tièdes
of yesteryear. These days I tend to use pancetta, which I cut myself into rugged little cubes, but can’t quite help still calling these lardons here, out of deference to the whole ethos of this dish. Feel free, however to buy those ready-cubed, skinny pink lardons which come in cellophane packages at the supermarket – or indeed just snip up some streaky bacon and fry up these instead. I have no compunction whatsoever about using shop-bought packages of those tender bubby spinach leaves; for me, this would be a non-starter if I had to get the grit off
real
spinach myself.

1 teaspoon olive oil (not extra virgin)

200g lardons

1 x 200g packet young spinach leaves

1 cold, cooked chicken breast, sliced or shredded

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

Put the teaspoon of oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan over a medium to high heat and when it’s warm add the lardons and fry till crispy, letting them ooze their salty juices into the pan; this will be the gloriously oily basis for the dressing later.

Toss the spinach leaves and chicken together in a bowl and when the lardons are cooked, take the pan off the heat and add them, too, transferring them with a slotted spatula, leaving the fat in the pan. Now stir the red wine vinegar into the pan, letting it hiss, bubble up and mix, and pour this on top of your salad. Quickly toss to mix: c’est ça.

Serves 1–2.

CHICKEN, ALMOND AND PARSLEY SALAD

This came about the way most of my favourite food has come about, by greedy opportunism. I had some cold chicken in the fridge, a huge bunch of parsley in a jug by the stove and had recently opened a packet of flaked almonds and I was just too hungry to think further. The important thing is to leave the parsley whole and unchopped – just tear the leaves off the stalks and heap them on the plate in a rough jumble – and to toast the almonds, which just means tossing them about over medium heat in an oil-less pan until they take on colour, at the last minute. I want the heat from them as well as the crunch.

1 cold cooked chicken breast, sliced and shredded

couple of handfuls fresh flat-leaf parsley

1 tablespoon or so extra virgin olive oil

juice of half a lemon

Maldon salt

50g or so flaked almonds, toasted

Using your hands, mix the chicken and parsley together in a large bowl or on a large plate. Dribble over the olive oil and, still using your hands, toss to mix. Now squeeze over the lemon juice, sprinkle over the salt and tip in most of the toasted almonds and toss again. Sprinkle over the remaining almonds, and your work here on earth is done.

Serves 1.

ZA’ATAR CHICKEN WITH FATTOUSH

This is what I make just about every other time I have friends over in summer, and regularly during the rest of the year too for that matter. It’s simple: the chicken deeply spiced with za’atar, that wonderful Middle-Eastern spice blend comprising thyme, sesame seeds and ground sumac, itself a glorious blood-red berry with an intensely astringent lemony tang; the salad a fresh tangle of mint, parsley, cucumber, tomato and spring onions, crumbled with torn shards of toasted pitta and sprinkled, again, with sumac. To be entirely proper, you should throw in some leafy, herbal purslane, too, but unless you happen to live near a Middle-Eastern shop, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get your hands on any, so I haven’t listed it below.

If you want to turn this into a real feast, then by all means supplement this oven-bronzed chicken in its nubbly, amber spices with the za’atar-marinated
lamb kebabs
. Know, too, that the za’atar itself is not the recondite ingredient it once would have been; my local supermarket stocks it, and the sumac, regularly, or you can order it from
www.seasonedpioneers.co.uk
, 0800 0682 348. I’m giving the recipe for the fattoush here simply because I’ve got in the habit of making these together, but this sour, refreshing Middle-Eastern bread salad has every right to an independent life of its own.

for the chicken:

125ml olive oil (not extra virgin)

1 chicken (approx. 2–2.25kg), cut into 8 pieces

2 tablespoons za’atar

Maldon salt

for the fattoush:

2 pitta breads

3 fat spring onions, halved and sliced

1 cucumber, peeled, quartered lengthwise and chopped

3 tomatoes, diced

bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped

bunch fresh mint, chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

6–8 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

juice of 1 lemon

Maldon salt

half a teaspoon sumac

Pour the 125ml oil into a large roasting tin, big enough to fit all the chicken portions in a single layer, and then put in these very chicken portions, rubbing them about in the oil to give them a glossy coating. Sprinkle over the za’atar, and then work into the oily skin of the chicken so that each piece is well covered with the bosky, bark-coloured spices. Leave the meat to marinate for a couple of hours at room temperature. Or you can do all the marinating in my usual plastic-bag way (see the next recipe); which is certainly easier if you plan to marinate these much in advance – a day or two would be fine – and therefore need to stash them in the fridge.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 8 and, when the chicken’s had its aromatic steeping time, transfer the tin, making sure all the chicken pieces are skin side up, to the oven. If you’ve marinated the chicken in a freezer-bag, just tumble them out,
pushing them skin side up, into a roasting tin, making absolutely sure you’ve squeezed over every last drop of the oily spice mixture they’ve been sitting in.

Roast the chicken portions for about 45 minutes, by which time they should be well cooked, which is how we want them here, and their spice-sprinkled skin burnished and crisp and baked to a fabulous burnt umber. Pile the pieces up, or arrange them as you like on a large flat plate and sprinkle over a little Maldon salt.

When the chicken’s nearly cooked, you can get on with the fattoush. So, cut the pitta breads open lengthways so that you have four very thin halves, and lay them on a baking sheet. Toast them in the oven with the chicken for about 5 minutes to give them a bit of crunch then take them out and leave them somewhere to cool.

In a bowl, combine the spring onions, cucumber, tomatoes, parsley and mint and mince in the garlic. With a pair of kitchen scissors, cut the pitta into pieces over the bowl of salad – I tend to snip them into rough triangles – and drop them in, leaving a few back for the top. Toss the salad then dress it with the oil and lemon juice, tossing it again. Add some Maldon salt, and have a quick taste to see if the ratio of oil and lemon is right, adding more of either if necessary. Sprinkle over the reserved toasted pitta triangles and the lovely dark red, deeply bitter sumac, and serve the fattoush right alongside the za’atar chicken.

Serves 6.

SPATCHCOCK CHICKEN WITH LEMON AND ROSEMARY

I am almost embarrassed to tell you how often I eat this. So often in fact that I always have a couple of chickens, spatchcocked, in the marinade and vacuum-sealed (I’m a girl who can’t resist a gadget) in plastic bags, waiting in the fridge, ready for the off at any given moment. The great thing about spatchcocked chicken – and forgive me if I’ve bored you with this before – is that it takes less time to cook than it does unflattened (so you’re never more than three-quarters of an hour away from a proper dinner; another roasting tinful of diced new potatoes, mished around in a little olive or garlic-infused oil can cook away in the rack underneath at the same time) and you don’t need to be good at carving. I just take a huge knife at it, and hack it into four greedy portions.

Obviously, you change the marinade as you wish. For one thing, I often leave out the onion altogether. And then, I sometimes steep the chicken just in a small amount of chopped tarragon, grated lemon zest and olive oil or go all-out fiery with smashed garlic, olive oil, a splosh of red wine vinegar and a small handful of crushed black peppercorns.

Any good butcher will spatchcock a chicken for you, or you could ask the butchery section at the supermarket to do it, but it’s easy enough for you to manage yourself at home and I have to say I love a bit of DIY surgery. Just get a pair of poultry shears or tough scissors (I use a pair sold by someone on one of those door-to-door yellow duster trails, made for cutting through tins and tough stuff) and lay the chicken, breast side down, on a surface and cut through all along one side of the backbone. Then cut along the other side of the backbone and – hey presto – the backbone can be removed and you then turn the bird the other way up and press down as you open it out. You have in front of you a perfectly spatchcocked chicken, thirstily ready for its marinade. But if you’re not up to this, life is not going to fall apart if you buy four chicken quarters instead.