Sinkless Salad (Dinner Chicken Salad)

The Insufficient Kitchen’s 70th post is occasioned by increasing insufficiency after the sink quit late Tuesday afternoon. Our plumber promised to appear Thursday morning.

Alas, he called needing to postpone until Friday morning. Confident of my amateur plumbing skills, he talked me under the sink, coaching in the art of garbage disposal maintainance:  “Just crank it like a car,” he said.

“Sure,” I’d replied brightly. I’ve never cranked a car in my life.

Wednesday night we supped on take-out. It was dismal. Huge, tasteless burgers hulked sullenly beside sodden, greasy fries. Thursday rolled around. The idea of more take-out somehow didn’t appeal. Nor did eating out. I wondered what to cook. And how I’d cook it.

Technically, the sink wasn’t dead. Despite having liberated itself from the mount, the faucet still worked. The problem was the garbage disposal. Not that I ever toss anything down its ravening maw–scraps go into the city compost bin. This doesn’t stop the drain from backing up after strenuous dishwashing sessions, requiring the disposal be run for a few seconds nightly.

This meant I could cook, provided the sink saw minimal action. Our hamburger adventure left both of us craving vegetables. Bagged salad would fulfill our longing without any cooking. The fridge held Meyer lemons, radishes and scallions, carrots and cucumbers. There were oven-dried cherry tomatoes in olive oil, preserved in bulk last summer.

Boneless chicken breasts would work well atop this salad. While they break my personal rules about buying boneless, skinless chicken, rules are made to be broken. I needed a protein that would cook in a single nonstick pan while creating little mess. Boneless breasts fit the bill.

The breasts were sautéed with plenty of lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and a little Marsala. They were sliced and arranged atop the salad veggies. The cooking juices were poured over all. This was served with good bread.

I expected nothing more than dinner until the plumber showed up. I certainly had no intention of writing about it. But Sinkless Salad proved a happy surprise. With its combination of textures, flavors, and contrasting temperatures, this is a dish willing to be dressed up or down according to taste, kitchen functionality, or occasion.

Sinkless Salad would work with all kinds of salad veggies: baby spinach, escarole, arugula, Romaine. Jicama would be delicious here. You can never go wrong with avocado. Increase the umami factor with capers, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, or, as I did, judicious amounts of fresh hot pepper (though only in my salad). The protein need not be chicken (I sometimes think this blog should be called “the insufficient chicken”); any thinly sliced, boneless cut of pork, lamb, steak, or piece of tofu would work beautifully. Cod or rockfish, flash-cooked with lots of lemon, would not go amiss, either. If you’ve come into an inheritance, or live where it’s affordable, shrimp makes this a dinner party dish.

Dress your salad with generous amounts of fresh lemon juice–Meyer, if you can get it–and the best olive oil you can afford.

The only things to avoid are saturating your plate in dressing–remember you’ve got the cooking juices in there–and overdoing it on ingredients. Taste as you go. If your salad is fabulous at 4 ingredients, it’s perfectly okay to stop there. So many recipes out there call for dozens of ingredients. And most of them, it seems, call for pepitas, pomegranate seeds, or salted caramel sauce. Why is this?

It is possible to have too much of a much.

This recipe is so easy it’s scarcely a recipe, but it was news to me, so perhaps it will also be news to some of you. Which brings me, some 600 words in, to my point: Sinkless Salad is less a recipe than a way of thinking outside the box.

Or in this case, of thinking without the sink.