I felt like chicken last night

Chicken and avocado salad with pine nuts, sesame seeds and lemon dressing

I sort of stole this recipe from The Spitz , a bar/restaurant/venue in Spitalfields Market, London. I had a particularly nice lunch there once and adapted it into something I could recreate at home.

Now, one of my main problems with chicken is that it's always overcooked. Generally I prefer meat to be cooked as little as possible, but that's quite hard to achieve with chicken if one wants to remain unpoisoned. So it usually ends up far too well done for my liking. What I normally do for this dish is to place chicken breasts on a baking tray, drizzled with olive oil, and cover them loosely with foil. Initially I oven bake them for 15 minutes (NB: ovens may vary, dear reader. Please make your own judgements as I've done!). Then I slice the chicken and, if it's still too pink inside, return it to the oven sliced under a new piece of foil for a few more minutes. This at least gives me control over the pinkness and texture, while the foil retains the moisture.

The next step is to slice an avocado - easy enough! For the salad base I usually go for something like watercress, spinach and rocket, upon which I place the avocado slices artistically!

Pine nuts are best slightly coloured, I think, so I place them in a dry frying pan and put them over a high heat for a couple of moments. They're then sprinkled over the salad along with some sesame seeds.

The dressing consists of olive oil, lemon juice, wholegrain mustard and honey. I'd love to be able to give you quantities, but I just sort of add alternate dollops until it tastes right.

The final step is to lay the sliced chicken onto the salad bed (lovingly, of course) and drizzle the dressing over everything. I add black pepper too, but then again I add black pepper to more or less everything.

Et voila!