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Sweet Potato and Chicken Salad

Sweet-Potato-Salad

Salad dressing can sometimes be a little problematic, in that it has an irritating tendency to obey the laws of gravity and sink to the bowels of one’s salad bowl. Allowing a well-made dressing to miss out on even a moment’s culinary action is, in my book, indefensible. Happily, chicken and sweet potato act as an edible sponge for superfluous juices and do a great job of mopping up recalcitrant drizzle. It pains me to describe a dish a ‘well-integrated’, but with every ingredient cooperating with one another on myriad different levels, it’s hard not to.

Sweet Potato and Chicken Salad

Though you (hopefully) remain subscribed to frugalfeeding, you may have discerned that I have finally leaped from the confines of wordpress.com into the open arms of wordpress.org. Though things may not look much different yet (give me time), this marks a new chapter in my career as a food blogger. So, join me in my celebrations and enjoy as much cake as is legal in your respective countries.

Local connection: Buying pre-butchered chicken is such an expensive way to eat poultry. Instead, why not purchase a free-range, ethically and sustainably sourced whole bird, roast it and make use of its meat over several days? Last week, we purchased a 1.6kg bird for around £10.50 from Source, Bristol. From it we expect to get seven meals for two (including stock made from the carcass and giblets). This approach really needs to catch on, especially since brown meat is by far the nicest!

Sweet Potato and Chicken Salad {recipe}

Serves 4

Ingredients:

• 2 sweet potatoes, cubed

• 150g leftover chicken, strips of

• 2 large handfuls of rocket leaves

• 1 red chilli, finely sliced

• 4 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil

• Juice of half a lemon

• A pinch of salt and pepper

Method:

1. Pop your sweet potatoes on a roasting tray, drizzle with oil and roast at 160C for 20-30 minutes, or until soft. Set aside to cool.

2. Beat together the oil, lemon, salt and pepper. Put the rocket, chicken, cooled potato and chilli in a large bowl, drizzle over the vinaigrette and mix thoroughly but gently. Serve immediately, though it will keep in the fridge for a day or two.

Cost: If prepared in the way described above chicken is an impressively frugal resource – the meat used in this dish cost around £1. Of course, sweet potatoes aren’t particularly expensive and neither is rocket. As a result you can expect this lovely salad to set you back around £3.

56 replies on “Sweet Potato and Chicken Salad”

If you were, as cookinginsens was afeared of, killing the bird yourself, you could wait till it laid 2 cartons of eggs and MAN would you make a lot of meals! All of that chicken AND the eggs? That would be the stuff that frugal dreams are made of ;). Anyway…you are scaring me a bit here Fruges…I just got a post in my inbox that apparently doesn’t exist…one of those “tester” posts that are designed to show we mere luddite bloggers that our food heroes are actually almost as fallible as we are and I class myself as the queen of blogging luddites…if you are challenging me to an old school dual, bring it on fruges! ;). Not that I would know how to take Serendipity Farm from WordPress.com to WordPress.org BUT Steve and I are learning about web design and maybe…just maybe…we might be able to do something like that ourselves in the not too distant future (when my ludditism takes more than a severe hit and I recover from the foetal position under the bed with the dog…). Wish us luck and good luck with the 7 meals. You are getting more and more like Hugh and less and less like Nige…kudos! 🙂

Haha – my flat isn’t the best space for a chicken! Very strange, hopefully all will start to work soon enough… Good luck – I’ll take that as a compliment!

If you can train a rabbit to live in a flat, why not a chook eh? 😉 Imagine the companionship? It could sit on the back of your dining chairs and could lay your morning breakfast (and wreak havoc on your sleep patterns, “decorate” your floor and scratch your carpet to distraction…). The Hugh thing IS a compliment. He is a sterling example of a celebrity who is actually worth watching and preserving at all costs. We love him here in Australia 🙂

Chickens are a smidge more messy than rabbits and around 100 per cent less… comfortable :D.

If you pluck them the plucked bits tend to be pretty comfortable…indeed the plucked bits of chooks and ducks and geese are what sends me to la-la land at night time in my comfy duvet ;). Eggs + feathers… about the only things that redeam chooks (apart from their tasty meat to those who take avail of it that is 😉 )

Quite exquisite this combination of contrasting flavors and textures, Nick – love the sweet roasted squash and slighly bitter rocket, and the heat and the tart! – please go ahead and sign me up for salad heaven! (No need to die first though, right? Just want be sure…)
And congrats on the move – I’ll look forward to seeing ALL you envision! 🙂

Yum this looks delicious. In my vegetarian days I used to make a similar salad with roasted sweet potato, pumpkin and chickpeas, but chicken sounds like it would go great with it.

In my part of the world (Australia) whole chickens seem to sell for the same price per kilo as chicken breasts, which is annoying because I would love to roast a chicken every week and use all of the parts. So I usually buy the drumsticks, which are much cheaper. However, I’ve only been buying meat for a couple of months, so I might be doing it wrong!

Seems the new year has given lots of people motivation to move their hosting sites for their blogs – good luck on the move ! And thanks for the recipe above – always looking for ways to make salads more yummy. I also love that you also use roast chicken carcasses for stock – the dinner that keeps on giving 🙂

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