Blood Orange & Chicken Salad with Tahini Dressing (Vegan Option)
I love the quality and freshness of peak season citrus fruits in January. My sugar free lemon curd, tart and meringue pie have been very popular here, but there is one citrus fruit I am even more excited about: blood oranges. We used to occasionally get blood orange juice for breakfast when I was growing up, and I would always love when my mum bought that instead of the regular juice. The colour and taste was so beautifully fresh and tart and…well, yum.
Fruit juice isn’t really on the menu for us these days due to the amount of sugar that gets released so quickly into the bloodstream and gets dumped on the liver. But I still have a soft spot for those delicious blood oranges. They may sound gross, but they are oh-so-beautiful in look and taste. And they go with so many many foods.
Even chicken.
Doesn’t sound right?
Maybe not, but then who thought chicken and peanut butter would work so well, either? And yet, that’s still my all-time favourite curry recipe.
This is a delicious, fresh, crisp and light salad that makes excellent use of leftover roast chicken. One of my New Year’s Resolutions has been to get better at batch cooking and freezer cooking, and it’s going pretty well so far. It’s saving us money, saving me lots of time, and reducing our food waste. Win-win-win. One of the things I’ve done this month is leave a whole chicken in the slow cooker and shred the meat to save in 1 cup portions in the freezer. It means I’ve got cooked shredded meat on hand to add to lunches whenever I need a little extra protein.
This recipe came about as a result of this month’s batch cook. And it tasted a-m-a-z-i-n-g! 🙂 And that tahini dressing… yum!
If you don’t have any leftover chicken or want a little more bite to this salad, a grilled chicken breast for every 2 portions of salad (2 breasts for the recipe as is) would make this even yummier! And if you are vegetarian or vegan, you could add a tin of cooked Puy lentils, which would give a similar neutral tasting “meaty” bite to the salad.
A surprisingly delicious, fresh and exciting salad.
- 4 blood oranges, peeled and sliced
- leftover cooked chicken (about 1 cup, or a couple of large handfuls), shredded (or use 2 grilled chicken breasts, finely sliced or 1 drained tin of cooked Puy or green lentils for a vegetarian/vegan version
- 1/2 pack fresh parsley leaves, roughly chopped
- 1 red onion, finely sliced
- 2 cooked beetroot, finely sliced (optional)
- 1 tbsp tahini
- juice of 1/2 a lemon
- 8 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
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Mix the salad ingredients together well. Make the dressing by putting all the ingredients in a lidded jar, adding seasoning and shaking the jar until combined. Serve the salad cold with the dressing.
