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.
