Easy-Peasy Store Cupboard Summer Salad

By Farhana Rahman

Summer Nights

Long balmy summer nights call for fresh, light, quick and easy suppers.  No one wants to spend hours sweating away in the kitchen at the best of times, but when summer’s here I like to pretend I’m on the telly and just ‘rustle something up’ a la Nigella: talking to myself the entire time and and scoffing my face as I cook.  And this beauty took all of ten minutes to make, so it was Fast Food but with extra brownie points for being super duper healthy.*

Store Cupboard Cheat Salads.

Keeping some frozen or tinned veg is always a winner when it gets to the end of the week(s) and you’re surviving on the last dregs of food in the fridge.  That shrivelled carrot will only get you so far.

I like to keep tinned goods (chickpeas, kidney beans, fish) and frozen veg (beans, sweetcorn, peas) so that when the fridge turns into a barren wasteland, I can throw together some kind of assortment of the above, chuck some olive oil/honey/balsamic dressing on it and fill up on some goodness before getting round to doing that pesky grocery shop.

(FYI: The recipe below does contain actual fresh ingredients as well – we’d just had some shopping delivered :)

Ingredients:

 

1.     Handful of salad leaves.  I am lazy and buy prewashed bags of the stuff.  Obviously a head of lettuce will do fine and take an entire 30 seconds extra to wash and cut.

2.     Handful of cherry tomatoes – chop them if you can be bothered.

3.     2 steamed beetroots, diced.

4.     1 cup frozen sweetcorn, defrosted up in the microwave

5.     1 tin of kidney beans

6.     Chopped and diced cucumber

7.     Optional: 1 tin of sardines – an excellent source of omega 3s.

Mix them all up and you’re good to go!  Enjoy!

*No brownies were involved in the making of this salad, otherwise this would nullify the aforementioned points.  Also it would be disgusting.