Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring a salad to a Saturday BBQ.
Constraints:
1. Not a green salad
2. You have 2 hours to shop, go home, make salad and arrive at your destination
3. Salad must still look fabulous in the three hours between construction and consumption
The solution is a simple chickpea salad. Healthy, tasty, colourful, quick, inexpensive and flexible – whatever you feel like, or whatever you have on hand.
I love roughly chopped fresh herbs. Some people like theirs finely chopped, but I just tear mine up and throw them in. I wish there was a way to describe how evocative the smell of freshly torn basil leaves is… I was thinking about this as I was making my salad, and I really don’t think it’s possible.
There really isn’t a recipe for this, just toss your ingredients together and spend the extra time getting changed or having a glass of wine.
Chickpea Salad
· 3 cans of chickpeas, well rinsed
· Handfuls of fresh Italian parsley and basil, torn or chopped
· ½ pack of feta cheese
· ½ C grated Parmesan cheese
· Juice of 1 lemon
· Pinch or two of dried chilli flakes
· Cherry tomatoes, halved
· ¼ C raisins, soaked for a few minutes in hot water
Toss all the ingredients together in a bowl, add salt and pepper (and extra lemon juice or chilli flakes) to taste. Drizzle with a good olive oil just before serving.
There are endless variations on this theme – add seafood, haloumi cheese, nuts, lemon zest, fresh chillis…. Endless!
We had ours with an enormous green salad, perfectly BBQed NZ lamb racks, some delicious red wine and excellent company.
Basilicious. You're welcome.
ReplyDelete