I don't always eat high fat hedonistic food. Sometimes I actually do try to eat healthy. Well, most of the time I do, it just doesn't look like that on here!
Today for my dinner I made myself a lush creamy chicken and avocado salad, with the creamy bit meaning the avocado. I adore avocado.
Not only is this low in carbs and keto friendly, but it is also totally gluten free for those who cannot tolerate gluten. If you rein in the dressing, it is also low in fat and I think totally Diabetic friendly.
Tender, perfectly cooked pieces of chicken sit atop a salad composed of mixed salad leaves, creamy avocado, and rehydrated sun dried tomatoes. Crisp pepitas or sunflower pumpkin seeds as you may know them, make for a tasty and crispy garnish.
You begin by marinating a boneless skinless chicken breast in a simple mixture of garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and some seasoning.
I cut the chicken breast through the middle horizontally, which really helps to ensure a tender finish when cooking.
Because it is thinner it doesn't take quite as long to cook it and still get it nicely browned. It also stays nice and moist that way.
I used sun dried tomatoes that have not been preserved in oil or in water. I buy them in a little tub at the farm market behind my house. They are really tasty and very easy to rehydrate by putting them in a cup and adding some boiling water.
Just leave them to plump up for a few minutes and then drain. I pat them dry after.
You can snip them up with a pair of kitchen scissors, or leave them as they are. I just left them as they were.
I love avocado. I used to be able to buy them frozen in the UK. They were excellent. I think I will start buying them up when they are on offer and freezing them when I can.
Make sure your avocado is ripe. Ripe avocados will have a dark green to nearly black skin, and should yield slightly when lightly pressed.
You should not be able to leave an indentation that stays and they shouldn't feel mushy. A ripe avocado will also have a pebbly skin rather than a smooth one.
There is nothing so lush and rich as a ripe avocado, but unripe ones are not very appealing or tasty. Been there, done that!
I remember ordering a sandwich as what was supposedly a premier sandwich shop in Chester in the UK one time. It was a California club or some such.
It was supposed to have Avocado in it, which it did, very sparse though I have to say. It was not ripe avocado however and was really nasty so I did remove it. Hard and tasteless.
You would think that a shop which specializes in sandwiches would know enough about all of the ingredients they are offering in their sandwiches to get it right!!!
Obviously not. Either that or their staff was not properly trained.
I just used a mix of garden salad leaves here today. Oh how I miss the Baby Gem lettuces from the UK. They were so good.
They looked like little tiny romaine lettuces, but a bit rounder and had a lovely bitter flavor. I could eat them just like apples, they were so good.
I have not seen them here at all. Perhaps this winter I will look for some seeds and possibly plant some next summer. They are my all favorite lettuces.
I used to love making this Baby Gem with Blue Cheese Vinaigrette Salad. It is quite simply my favorite salad. It was from a recipe I found in Good Food magazine a long time ago. Delicious.
But then I am a salad lover full stop and have many favourites.
One thing I love about this one is the pumpkin seeds. I used roasted salted. Because I am naughty like that. You can use just plain roasted if you wish.
They added just a tiny bit of salty crunch. I think if a salad is going to be your main meal for the day, you deserve a bit of salty crunch.
And these have to be much better for you than croutons! So there!
The dressing for this salad is a zesty lime vinaigrette. Its just fresh lime juice, olive oil and seasoning.
Simple. Don't be tempted to use those little squeeze bottles of lime juice. You wouldn't get that same fresh zip that you get from using the real deal. I think you could add a bit of the lime zest as well, which would be nice.
I love the simplicity of the way the chicken is cooked and handled and I loved the nutty crunch of the pumpkin seeds. The richness of the avocado, the sweetness of the tomatoes. I could not improve upon it if I tried.
In short, I quite simply love this salad and I hope that you will too!
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Chicken, Avocado & Tomato Salad
Yield: 1
Prep time: 15 MinTotal time: 15 Min
This easy and delicious salad boasts a tangy lime vinaigrette dressing, along with creamy slices of avocado, sweet sun dried tomatoes, crisp pumpkin seeds and perfectly cooked chicken.
Ingredients
For the chicken:
- the juice of 1/2 lemon
- 1 fat clove of garlic, peeled and minced
- 1 TBS light olive oil
- fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced in half horizontally
For the dressing:
- the juice of one lime
- 3 TBS extra virgin olive oil
- salt and black pepper to taste
For the salad:
- a large handful of mixed salad leaves
- 1 ripe avocado, peeled and sliced
- 8 sun dried tomato halves
- 1 heaped TBS pumpkin seeds
Instructions
- Measure the lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper into a dish along with the garlic. Add the chicken pieces and turn them to coat in the marinade. Set them aside to marinate for about 30 minutes, giving them a swish every now and then.
- Heat a skillet over medium high heat. Add the chicken breasts and cook for about 3 minutes per side, until golden brown. Remove from the heat, cut into slices and then return to the pan and cook for a further 3 to 4 minutes until no longer pink and nicely glazed. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
- While they are cooling place the sundried tomatoes into a jar and cover with boiling water. Leave to sit for 5 minutes and then drain completely and pat dry.
- Whisk together the ingredients for your dressing.
- Put the salad leaves, avocado and sundried tomatoes into a bowl. Toss with about half of the dressing. Then place onto a chilled dinner plate.
- Top with the sliced cooked chicken and sprinkle with pumpkin seeds.
- Drizzle with some of the remaining dressing and serve. Save the rest to use as desired.
Cherry and Vanilla Scones. These are not cherry scones. These are not vanilla scones. These are Cherry and Vanilla Scones and they are completely different from my other Cherry Vanilla Scone recipe.
That one uses dried sour cherries and is lovely in its own tasty right, sporting a sweet vanilla glaze.
This easy recipe uses candied cherries, or glace cherries as they are also known. Feel free to use maraschino cherries if you cannot find the glace cherries. Just make sure you rinse them well and then dry them before using them in the recipe.
Otherwise they will tint your scone dough pink.
The recipe for these scones was adapted from one I found in a little National Trust book entitled The National Trust Book of Scones.
I love National Trust recipes and their books. They are filled with lots of little antidotes and many are actually recipes which are used in the tea rooms at their various properties which are dotted all over the country.
We always belonged to the National Trust when I was in the UK. They are a trust for the preservation of historic properties, gardens and farms all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I have always loved visiting their historic properties. Not only are they areas of great beauty, but they are always fascinating and quite informative, historically speaking. I do believe that the Prince of Wales is a Patron.
Beatrix Potter bought up huge scathes of land and properties in the Lake District in an effort to prevent developers from taking over the area and destroying its natural beauty, which was then turned over to the Trust upon her passing.
The Trust is a worthy association which has done a lot to preserve the history and beauty of the UK. They are mainly supported by people visiting these properties and by people who donate to and support the organization. I worry about how it may have fared during Covid.
I hope that it will come out alright in the end.
I wish they had properties such as those here in Canada. I am a real history buff and I love visiting places like this. This is one thing I have in common with Susan Branch.
Anyways, if you ever have the chance to visit the UK, so go to as many National Trust Properties as you can. You won't regret it. You can buy a membership for the time that you are there and it will allow you to into as many places as you wish to for that given year. Well worth the price.
Most of their properties have shops and tearooms/restaurants/cafe's attached where you can go and sit down and have a lunch or a drink and a piece of cake or whatnot. Their treats on offer usually reflect the property where the teashop is located.
All of their food is great. We never visited one without having a drink and a piece of cake or a scone.
As I said, this scone recipe comes from one of their books and I would classify it as an every day type of scone. There are no eggs and cream in it.
Just simple ingredients. Self raising flour, butter, sugar, milk and vanilla. Oh, and those candied glace cherries.
True confession here. I did run out of red cherries today and had to resort to using a few green ones. I could have left them out altogether, but I did want to be able to taste the results from having used the full amount.
It is a generous amount of glace cherries to be honest, which is just lovely. That means they are generously studded throughout with bits of sweet cherry.
I know that it might be difficult for some of you to get glace cherries. You can use maraschino cherries in a pinch, but do beware that they are a bit flimsier than glace cherries.
You will need to rinse them well, and dry them really well, and then be gentle in your handling of them. I always rinse and dry my glace cherries as well.
These are not quite as rich as scones made with cream and butter, but they are still really lovely. Light and crumbly and sturdy enough to spread with cold butter without tearing or breaking apart.
You can enjoy them warm of course, but the wonderful thing about scones is they are equally as delicious to enjoy cold as they are warm.
The same basic principles apply when making scones as when making biscuits. You will always need to use a gentle hand in order to keep them from being tough.
You also need to get as many cuts as you can from the first patting out as subsequent cuts will not be as perfect looking once baked as the first cuts will.
Also for straight sided scones, take care not to twist your cutter when cutting them out. Twisting the cutter seals the edges which prevents your scones from rising properly.
You will get a much higher rise if you stamp them out with a straight up and down motion. Also the re-pats and cuts will not be as tender, because once again . . . they are a fussy bread which benefits from the least amount of attention as possible.
I know my scones and have shared quite a few different recipes on here over the years for a variety of both savory and sweet scones.
Some of my favorites are: Honey and Date Scones (flavored with honey and studded with plenty of bits of dates), Cheese, Spring Onion and Bacon (studded with cheese, chopped spring onions and crispy bits of bacon. Great with soups or salads), Nan's Sugar Scones (a lemon soaked sugar cube is inserted in the center prior to baking, resulting in an almost lemon curd like filling), Irish Coffee Cake Scones (studded with dried currants and topped with a crunchy streusel topping), Three Ingredient Cheese Scones (yes, only three ingredients. Nice and cheesy.)
My favorite all time Classic Fruited Scones (the kind you will find on offer at most establishments and tearooms in the UK), these are scone perfection. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you click here you will get a list of all my scone recipes.
So you can see, I really love scones, and I was very pleased with the way these turned out. Warm or cold, with butter or without.
With or without jam or honey, even just on their own, these are quite simply really nice scones. I was very pleased with the outcome and I think you will be too! Enjoy!
Cherry & Vanilla Scones
Yield: Makes 10 (3-inch) scones
Prep time: 15 MinCook time: 18 MinTotal time: 33 Min
Simple to make, studded with cherries and flavored with vanilla.
Ingredients
- 3 1/2 cups + 2 TBS (500g) self-raising flour
- 1/3 cup (40g) finely granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup (60g) cold butter, cubed
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 120ml (1/2 cup) whole milk (may need more)
- 1 3/4 cup (200g) glace cherries, quartered
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375*F/190*C/ gas mark 5. Line a large baking tray with some baking paper. Set aside.
- Sift the flour and sugar into a mixing bowl. Drop in the bits of butter. Rub the butter in, using your fingertips, until the mixture resembles fine dry bread crumbs.
- Mix the milk with the vanilla. Make a well in the center of the flour mixture and add the milk gradually, mixing with a round bladed knife until you have a soft dough. You may need more or less milk. Stir in the cherries, distributing them as evenly as you can.
- Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and pat out to approximately 1 1/2 inches in thickness. Cut into 3 inch rounds using a floured cutter and taking care not to twist the cutter.
- Transfer the rounds to the prepared baking sheet, leaving about 2 inches in between each. Re-pat the scraps and repeat cutting until you have cut all your scones. (Bear in mind the most tender scones will be the ones from the first cutting, so do try to get as many from that as you can.)
- Brush the top of each scone with a bit of milk and bake in the preheated oven for 15 to 18 minutes, until well risen and golden brown.
- Scoop off onto a wire rack to cool. Best served warm with some butter and jam.
Notes:
You can easily make your own self-rising flour. Just add 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp of salt to each cup (140g) of flour needed. Works a charm. This is what I used here today.
Thanks so much for visiting! Do come again!
Tuna Nicoise Salad. I confess I am a huge fan of salads in the summer months. I especially love main dish salads like this one, which is not only a feast for the eyes, but for the tummy as well.
Nicoise Salad or Salad Niçoise as it is also called is a French Salad. It is what is known as a composed salad, somewhat similar to a Cobb salad, with the main difference here being that there is no chicken involved and no bacon either!
This delicious salad comes from Nice, France, which is on the Mediterranean side of France. The side where the Riviera is. So think seafood and sunshine.
One thing which I like about it is that its a salad in which you can totally prepare all of the elements for it ahead of time. This makes it a perfect salad for entertaining as you need only whisk up a dressing and throw things together at the last minute!
The main ingredients for the salad are tuna (of course), boiled potatoes, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, green beans and black olives.
In France they always use tinned tuna. I use tinned tuna, but you can certainly cook fresh tuna steaks in the place of the tinned tuna if you wish. Just make sure you don't overcook them or you run the risk of them tasting like chicken.
And trust me, if you have run to the expense of buying fresh tuna steaks to use in this delicious salad, you don't want it to taste like chicken. One minute per side is all you really need as far as cook time goes.
I always just use tinned tuna myself. I do use a solid albacore tuna however. I never buy any other kind. Its just my preference when it comes to tuna.
An Italian lady stopped me in the grocery store one day while I was buying tuna and told me that I should only ever buy albacore tuna. She said the rest was garbage.
Who am I to argue with experience! I was quite young at the time and she seemed to be quite old. In all truth she was probably younger then than I am now, but hey ho! She knew what she was talking about.
I have never bought anything but Albacore tuna since that day. I know it can seem to be a bit expensive, but at the end of the day, you always get what you pay for.
I like it in water or in oil. The one in oil is infinitely better, but because I am watching my cholesterol these days, I always settle for it in water.
This is a wonderful time of year to enjoy this salad. We are being spoiled right now with an abundance of fresh summer vegetables. Green beans, tomatoes, new potatoes, salad leaves.
Everything is so fresh and local and delicious! It doesn't get much better than this!
I love the wonderful earthy flavors of fresh new potatoes. You don't need to do anything special to them, just wash them really well and pop them into a saucepan of boiling lightly salted water.
10 to 15 minutes later, depending on the size of your potatoes, they are done to perfectly. I like them with the skins on myself. More fiber and that skin is so delicious.
Green beans are in season at the moment and our local ones are beautiful. So are the golden yellow wax beans. I have been feasting on them while I can!!
You want to pick beans for this salad that are not overly large in size. The smaller ones have the best flavor.
I have chosen today to use a mix of salad greens consisting of spinach and baby rocket/agugula. I love the iron earthiness of spinach and I just adore the peppery and meaty punch of rocket leaves!
I eat a lot of rocket, truth be told. I love it in sandwiches, on burgers and all sorts. Trust me when I say a roast beef sandwich with horseradish mayo and rocket leaves is a sandwich made in heaven!
I only ever buy free range eggs. If you are lucky enough to have a farm close by where you can buy free range eggs, so much the better.
Many people are greatly intimidated at the thought of hard boiling eggs. Its really not that hard and is a matter of timing. To hard boil eggs with a firm white and yolk start with room temperature eggs.
Pierce the large end of the egg with an egg piercer or a needle; this helps to prevent the egg from cracking in the heat of the water.
Place then into a saucepan and cover them completely in water. Bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes, maximum.
At the end of that time, remove them from the heat and place them in cold water immediately. This will prevent them from over-cooking and developing that unsightly dark ring around the yolks.
They will still taste okay, should the dark ring develop, but they are not as attractive to look at and in this salad, that's quite important.
Black olives are also an important part of this salad. You should use Nicoise olives if you can find them. I can't find those here so I have used Kalamata olives, which are a wonderful substitution.
The final salad ingredient is ripe garden tomatoes. They are starting to come into their own now. Just an ordinary tomato will do . . . fresh from the vine with the warmth of the summer sun still on its skin.
That's what you want, and what is ideal. Failing that, just get the best your money can buy and leave them at room temperature to ripen for a few days. You won't be sorry!
There are a few other things you can add if you want to. Capers is one. I adore capers. Vinegary, salty, they go so very well here.
Some thinly sliced red onion also works well. I have gone for simplicity here however, so I did not include either of those two things.
The final element of course is the dressing and I say keep it simple. I have chosen to use a simple vinaigrette dressing without any bells and whistles. With all of that fresh produce, why run the risk of overwhelming them with a dressing which is overly flavored.
Simple. Simple. Simple. Oil, vinegar and seasoning. That's all you need. Let the beauty of your fresh ingredients speak for themselves. Let them sing. A good dressing will only enhance their flavors, not overwhelm them. This simple dressing does just that.
Enjoy!
Tuna Nicoise Salad
Yield: 2
A beautiful main dish salad for those days when you just can't be asked to cook. It makes a great use of the abundant produce available to us this time of year as well.
Ingredients
For the dressing:
- 2 TBS white wine vinegar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 cup (120ml) olive oil
- 1/4 tsp ground paprika
For the salad:
- 2 large free range eggs, hardboiled. peeled and quartered
- 4 new potatoes, scrubbed, cooked and quartered
- 12 French beans, washed, trimmed and cooked until crispy tender
- 2 heaped cups (120g) mixed salad leaves
- 2 tomatoes, washed and quartered
- 12 kalamata olives
- 1 (6 1/2 -ounce/170g) solid albacore tuna, drained
Instructions
- Mix the vinegar and the salt together for the dressing in a small bowl. Leave to stand for a few minutes. Add the pepper and then slowly whisk in the olive oil until the mixture emulsifies. Whisk in the paprika. Taste and adjust seasoning as required. Set aside.
- Put the eggs and potatoes into a mixing bowl. Toss with a little bit of the dressing.
- Divide the salad leaves between two chilled plates. Top with the eggs and potatoes. Add the tomatoes and green beans. Place all of this around the edges. Divide the tuna in half and place half in the center of each plate. Scatter the olives over top.
- Drizzle the remaining dressing over everything and serve immediately.
Notes:
You can use two fresh tuna steaks in the place of the tinned tuna. Put a small amount of oil in a skillet and heat over high heat. Season the tuna steaks and sear them in the hot oil, cooking them for no longer than 1 minute per side. Place one onto each plate of salad and serve.
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