I was so tired yesterday. A party on Saturday took time to recover from on Sunday. A busy Sunday took time to recover from on Monday. By Monday evening I was ready to crawl into bed by about 6pm – not an option. Particularly given I’m not sleeping well and my usual 5am wake-up would have doubtless turned into a 3am fend-off-cat-and-lie-in-bed-worrying-about-stuff-for-hours-wake-up.

On the Sunday I’d cooked a ‘summer’ roast chicken (really means replacing roasties for Jersey Royals and in this case bread sauce for creamed celeriac – the boys were thrilled about that swap-in). There’d been a bit of a hoo ha about whether we needed to buy one chicken or two. I’d come back with one, and then panic bought a second. As it turned out the second was surplus to requirements for Sunday, but meant that we had a whole cooked chicken for Monday. We also had Jersey Royals going spare, which just left a salad to go with.

What would be a filling, flavourful and nutritious salad with a balance of sweet with salty? A soul food salad. I was thinking Greek, but didn’t have any olives, so decided to make this colourful feel-good version with what I did have. It’s pretty close to the original but with a few twists.

Ingredients
3 x Isle of Wight tomatoes, roughly chopped
1/2 x red onion sliced finely into half-circles
1 x block of Feta cheese
1/2 x cucumber peeled, halved and cut into small quarters
1 x heaped dessert spoon pomegranate seeds

Method
Mix

Damned if I could find the english mustard for my dressing, which meant another departure from the classic version using course grain mustard instead. I would usually add white wine vinegar to a vinaigrette but with course grain I find it’s vinegary enough not to need it.

Dressing
1 x teaspoon course grain mustard
1/2 teaspoon runny honey
50 (ish) mls x extra virgin olive oil

Method
Mix the honey with the mustard into a paste
Add the olive oil and stir/shake until emulsified

Our bees are going great guns so I’m very lucky to be able to use our own honey for the dressing. In a few weeks time, I’ll be able to add in quite a few fresh vegetables from Eddie’s allotment to our meals – always so much tastier than anything you can buy in the shops.

And the salad? Just the job for a Monday, a perfect accompaniment to cold chook. And me – in bed by 9pm.