I like a roast chicken, especially one that I haven’t had to roast. Most grocery stores do pretty good ones nowadays, so if I’m looking to cut down on prep time for a meal, picking up a couple of them is usually a good idea. I usually let them sit in the fridge for a day to firm up, then strip the meat off the bone and dice it up.  That way, later on when I’m hungry and tired, I’ve got a lot less prep to do.

There’s lots of different ways to make chicken salad. I like shallots, really finely diced, celery, also really finely diced, campari tomatoes with the seeds and pulp removed and also diced. In my kitchen, I have parsley and thai basil growing in pots in the window-sill. I grab some of each, roll them up in a tight ball and slice them very fine. That’s called a chiffonade, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJEQFgfv7iw and it is a French technique. Nice way to get the herbs finely chopped pretty quickly. Add a little kosher salt, some ground black pepper, and a dash of cayenne. Then add mayo and brown mustard and stir all together.

I like this salad on toasted sourdough. A scoop on some toast, topped with a nice thin slice of cheddar, or a little blue cheese crumble, then under the broiler until the cheese is bubbly. Mine was served with supremed pink grapefruit. To supreme a grapefruit, slice the the skin of the grapefruit with a chef’s knife, then cut between the wedge-shaped membranes. Gives you a lovely slice of grapefruit without all that chewy skin that comes on the sections.

Dig in.