Cold Chicken, Carrot Salad and Yogurt Sauce

There are certain dinners we make for ourselves that maybe shouldn’t be shared in public.

It’s one thing to share a recipe for a roast chicken, for example; everyone gets that, everyone wants that. But the next day, when that chicken’s cold and wrapped in aluminum foil in your refrigerator and you have a few stray carrots and some yogurt and some raisins and some eggs, and you make a dinner with those things? People may not want to hear about that. So if you’re one of those people, look away! Everyone else, here’s a dinner I made for myself last week.

First, I made a yogurt sauce by chopping two cloves of garlic and some preserved lemons I bought from Cookbook in Echo Park:

IMG_8999

Then I added a big spoonful of Greek yogurt:

IMG_9000

And thinned it out with lemon juice, seasoning with a little salt and pepper:

IMG_9001

With the sauce made, I set about making a carrot salad. That was easy: I grated 3 or 4 large carrots on the big holes of a box grater. I put them in a bowl and then riffed on Dorie Greenspan’s mustard bottle vinaigrette, using an almost empty mustard bottle and adding honey, white balsamic, olive oil, a pinch of salt and pepper and shaking until it emulsified.

I poured that over the carrots, sprinkling with raisins and some Feta. That was my carrot salad.

Finally, after cutting the meat off the cold chicken carcass, I boiled two eggs because, earlier that day, I’d purchased Piment d’Espelette (a pricey, beloved, spicy red pepper from France) at Atwater Village Farm and wanted to give it a taste. I thought hard-boiled eggs would be the perfect vehicle, and they were!

So there you have it: a cold dinner of delectable foods that paired very nicely with chilled white wine.

IMG_9010

Is it a dinner we’d invite people over for? Definitely not. It’s just the kind of dinner you eat alone (Craig was in Seattle) and enjoy without thinking too much about it.

Let's dish!

Scroll to Top