Summer Chicken & Melon Salad & Pavlova Mash

Main:  Summer Chicken & Melon Salad
Northern Beaches Cooks

Dessert:  Pavlova Mash
A WWW creation

Hello everyone,

Well I am very excited this week because I have one of my overseas family members arriving home tomorrow.  You know what this means don’t you!  Many, many Wine Wednesdays.  However, because they are only visiting for a short time we will have to have Wine Wednesday, Tequila Tuesday, Thirsty Thursday and Sangria Sunday just to mention a few so that we can bring these gorgeous family members up to speed.  I’ll have to let you know how that goes my friends.

This beautiful summer salad was originally a Women’s Weekly recipe I believe, although not entirely sure but I found it in this cookbook that was put together some years ago by the Northern Beaches Christian School to raise money and it has served me well over the years.  The recipe calls for chicken breasts to be poached and then sliced when cool which I did and they were very tender, however, if you want to throw this together and you are short of time you could shred a BBQ’d chook and use that.  I add loads of extras too.  Grapes, mango, avocado and walnuts.  If the mandarines are good you could add segments of those as well.  I like to put my salad on a bed of baby spinach which adds a little more texture, colour and flavour not to mention the fact that they are so very good for you.  (I am a bit of a baby spinach addict). The dressing is simple and could be made hours ahead.  The combination of the lemon and ginger with that dash of honey is truly yummy.  One of those salads you really feel satisfied with.  Everyone gave this an average of 9/10.

Okay you guessed it….. I just couldn’t pick a dessert that grabbed me or that I felt like fiddling with in the heat.  So a put together a simple pavlova base.  Whipped some cream to which I added Cointreau and stirred through a selection of berries.  I had fun crumbling up the pav base and then put some of that in the bottom of each serving plate, topped with the fruity cream.  Ahhhh, but it lacked something me thinks.  So having just stewed some rhubarb and apple, I syphoned off some of the juice, added more Cointreau and drizzled it over the cream. OMG…. to.  die.  for.   So darn simple and it rated an unanimous 10/10!  So you will not see a recipe for this at the bottom because it’s one of those made up desserts that you can try and have fun with.  Even if you buy a ready made pav base – what could be easier really.

So my loverlies give these two simple recipes a go.

Until next week…..

From my table to yours with love x