Soba Noodle Salad with broccoli, chicken and toasted nori by Karen Martini.

Oh my goodness it's Sunday already!!??

It's been a beautiful weekend of weather and what more to celebrate summer on it's way than salads!!

I love a good salad. I'd been eye-ing off this recipe for ages but always went past it because of the sauce it used which I could never find in the super market and the fact that it used cooked roast chicken. I don't know how often you have left over roast chicken in your house but I don't have it often so the leftovers are always minimal.

But you know... who's going to stop me from roasting a couple of chicken breasts and shredding them especially for the salad. It's not hard work. Turn the oven on, place 2 chicken breast on a baking tray with some olive oil, salt and pepper and cook for 45 min. Done.

SO with no more excuses I finally made the soba noodle salad with broccoli, chicken and toasted nori from Karen Martini's Feasting cookbook that I'd been wanting to make for ages. Actually there are so many dishes in the book that I want to make but the book is set out as huge feasts and all of the dishes feed alot of people. Yes I know I can cut the down and halve them but it's hard when I'm menu planning for the week to grab a book that has all these beautiful large feasts in it when I'm looking for a quick midweek meal. But I was wrong about this book. I was pleasantly surprised that the recipe I chose was easy and didn't take that long, it was a perfect midweek meal with leftovers for lunch the following day (the nori sheets went a little soft but the flavours were maybe even better).

The recipe calls for ponzu... yeh I didn't know what that was either so I googled it while grocery shopping and it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to find in a well stocked supermarket but the one I go to is being renovated at the moment so is not so great. But here's hoping it gets better! When I couldn't find ponzu on the shelves I googled how to make it and I came across a few recipes that required reduced master stock and other fancy ingredients only available form asian grocery stores and nothing could help me in my supermarket dilema. Then I found a simple version here. What did I have to loose? If it tasted bad then I wouldn't use it and we'd make something else up instead and if it did then I could feel like a ponzu genius.

I felt like a ponzu genius.

The whole salad was super yummy. It impressed me so much how all the flavours worked together and how fresh and delicious it all tasted. YUM. I will definitely do this again soon now that I know how easy and tasty it is. Plus I feel that it's pretty healthy too... correct me if I'm not though.

It felt healthy anyway :)

A great recipe for when you have the girls over because you can have it already to go then add the nori sheets and dress it right before you serve and there is no excess cooking while people are over. And you can fell healthy eating it so the ice cream after doesn't make you feel too guilty :)

Soba Noodle Salad with broccoli, chicken and toasted nori

serves 4

recipe adapted from Karen Martini's cookbook 'Feasting' - find original recipe on here

2 chicken breasts

2 tbsp olive oil

pinch of salt & pepper

(or 400g leftover roast chicken, shredded)

300g dried soba noodles

1 head broccoli, cut into florets

2 tbsp sesame seeds

2 tsp sesame oil

60ml soy sauce

30ml rice wine vinegar

30ml cup lime juice

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 heaped tsp jarred grated ginger

5 spring onions, finely sliced

1 sheet of toasted nori, roughly ripped into shreds

- Preheat your oven to 200 C or 400 F.

- Drizzle olive oil over chicken and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place on a baking tray and bake for 30-45 minute or until cooked through. Remove from the oven and cover with foil to keep in the juices.

- Go and do something else fun for a little while so it can cool down a little (or prep everything else so it's all ready to do).

- Combine the sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, lime juice, extra virgin olive oil and ginger in a large bowl (your will eventually put everything in this bowl - the bigger the better).

- Cook the soba noodles according to packet instructions (mine took about 3-4 minutes), drain and refresh under cold water.

- Cook the broccoli for 2 minutes and then drain, rinsing under cold water.

- Shred the chicken breasts with two forks. 

- Place chicken, noodles, broccoli, spring onions into the bowl with all the sauces and top with nori.

- Serve cold or at room temperature.

Karen Martini 's Roast Chicken with green olives, almonds and oregano.

This week has been a bit of a busy shamozzle.

Monday night I had planned to cook... grocery shopping didn't finish until after 7pm and the thought of cooking and having to wash up was so daunting that when Tristan offered to buy us pizza I jumped at it.

Tuesday night I cooked Karen Martini's Roast Chicken with green olives, almonds and oregano but instead of it taking about 30 minutes in the oven like the recipe said it took about an hour which meant we didn't eat dinner till about 8:30pm and then still had the washing up to do so blogging didn't happen.

Wednesday night I had team meeting at work and we are spoilt and get fed dinner during the meeting. We had a delicious vegetarian Nepalese Feast which also made up my lunch on Thursday.

Thursday night I finished work later than normal and Tristan had cooked chicken taco's for dinner and cleaned up too (spoilt rotten!).

Friday night went pear shape after I popped my car tyre trying to turn around in our street to park and hit the gutter and ended up in a flood of tears sitting in my car after a stressful day. That then meant we were going out for a strong drink and pub dinner.

Saturday was kind of productive... feeling a little sorry for myself after too many $5 vodkas the night before I made a red velvet cake for my sister's birthday BBQ that night, a mexican layer dip and burnt toasted sandwiches. I barely had time to recover before I was handed a glass of champagne and Saturday night shenanigans started - which were very chilled out after the Friday night we had.

Lets get back on track with Tuesday's dinner. Karen Martini's Roast Chicken with green olives, almonds and oregano from Where the Heart is. It was soooooo tasty but it also could have been the fact that my stomach was eating itself because we were so hungry by the time it was ready and so over hearing my iphone timer going off every 15min while I checked if the potatoes were done or not. I think my down fall was that I put it all into a dish that was deep so it took longer for the potatoes to cook rather than if I had spread it out in a shallow baking dish or it could have been our oven... it isn't fan forced and things do take a little longer in there and 90% of the time I get the conversion of celsius to fahrenheit wrong.

Tristan didn't seem too keen that there was almonds in the dinner when I started cooking it but I added them in there anyway and I got no complaints when I served it. My photo's of the final result aren't crash hot so I haven't uploaded them considering I had the hunger grumps when it was finally ready. I would defiantly make it again but allow more time to cook it and put in a different tray. It would be a great recipe to double and make for a dinner party because you can have everything ready before and just bung it in the oven. Not your average one pot roast chicken thats for sure!

Roast Chicken with green olives, almonds and oregano by Karen Martini (from Where the Heart is).

serves 4

1 cup of blanched almonds, roughly chopped
80g pitted green olives, chopped
1 cup flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
1 bunch oregano leaves, finely chopped
2 green chilli's, sliced
100mL extra virgin olive oil
cracked black pepper
2 red chilli's, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 lemon, juice and zest
salt flakes
1.5 tbsp dijon mustard
4 free range chicken marylands (I used 'lovely-legs' instead)
3 desiree potatoes, peeled and finely sliced
2 red onions, sliced into rings
1/2 cup water (125mL)
1/2 cup white wine (125mL)

- Turn oven on to 200 degrees celsius.

- Put your almonds, olives, parsley, oregano, and green chilli's and some of the olive oil in a bowl and season with black cracked pepper.

- In a separate bowl, mix together the red chilli, garlic, lemon zest, lemon juice and mustard then season with salt flakes and cracked pepper. Coat the chicken pieces in this mixture and let sit for 10min to absorb the flavours of the marinade.

- Add the remainder of the olive oil to a frying pan on high heat and brown chicken pieces until golden on all sides. Once all the chicken is browned add it to the almond mixture and mix together.

- Add potato and onion to a greased oven proof dish then top with the chicken pieces and all the marinade misture. Pour over the wine and water. Cover with foil.

- The recipe says to bake it for 15min covered then 10-15 min uncovered but it depends on when your potatoes are cooked. Check how they are doing after the first 15min and you may need longer if you stuffed everything in a dish too small (I baked this fro about 1 hour total). Enjoy.