Recipe: Chickpea, avocado, red onion, halloumi salad

Simple, easy food…I draw the line at ready meals, and processed food (beyond pulses, & the odd Pot Noodle when desperate), doesn’t appeal to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t cook when I’m running around like a headless chicken. I set a limit of twenty minutes for prep & cooking, and it’s surprising how much you can make in that time frame.

This is the salad that I eat all year round with a few variations, & I reckon it comes in at under fifteen minutes. It’s wonderful in winter because the crunch of the onion & the sharp tang of the lemon juice con your senses that spring could be just around the corner.

Best of all, it has just four main ingredients: (Shown below is plenty for two as a main course lunch.)

Finely chop the red onion by making vertical slices, and then cutting across.

I then chop it some more:

Open the tin of chickpeas, rinse & drain. Peel and roughly dice the flesh of one avocado and mix it into the onion. Hands are good for this. Add the chickpeas to the avocado  & onions.

Slice up a 2″ chunk of halloumi

Cook it in a hot frying pan without any oil until it is browned on each side.

Chop it up into bite size pieces. I always cook more than I need for the salad as I tend to eat quite a lot en route…

Add the cheese to the onion, chickpeas s & avocados, along with a good squeeze of lemon juice, crunchy Maldon salt, freshly ground black pepper, and a dash of good olive oil — preferably the herby, grassy Greek stuff. (In honour of Kiki.)

Serve with lettuce leaves and pitta bread for scooping.

Of course you could substitute pretty much any kind of cheese for the halloumi, but think about the contrast of textures. A vegan reader asked about marinated tofu in this recipe, and I don’t see why not so long as it is firm or pressed tofu.