Each season has a chicken. Fall’s chicken is soupy and stewy; winter’s is a festive roast bird. Spring’s chicken, if not seared in a skillet and scattered with herbs, is fried (for picnics under the flowering trees, naturally).
Summer? Summer’s chicken is a rotisserie chicken.
Pick it up on that Costco run for sunscreen and pool noodles. If your farmers’ market has one of those portable rotisseries with the golden birds spinning above a trough of potatoes, those are your summer chickens. Could summer’s chicken be grilled? Absolutely. But I don’t have a grill, and open flames lose their appeal when the sun is already blazing.
So let’s all pick up a summer — sorry, rotisserie — chicken to make Yewande Komolafe’s chicken and herb salad with nuoc cham, a happy jumble of chicken, cabbage, crunchy vegetables and leafy herbs in an assertively zippy dressing. It’s a star of our no-cook collection, a compilation of recipes that don’t require any stove or oven action.
If you’re new to nuoc cham, you’re in for a treat: It’s a lip-smacking, salty-sour-sweet mix of garlic, chile, sugar, lime juice and fish sauce. And if you know (and thus love) the charms of nuoc cham, you know that keeping a jar in your fridge is a pro move, so that you’re not only set for Yewande’s salad, but for any number of quick, healthy, summery meals.
Featured Recipe
Chicken and Herb Salad With Nuoc Cham
Today’s specials
Crispy suya-spiced salmon: “Traditionally used to season grilled meat skewers in Nigeria, suya spice (also called yaji) is a spicy peanut-based blend that brings a bold, layered flavor to anything you throw on the grill — and it has plenty of other uses, too,” Kiano Moju writes of her new recipe. She recommends serving it with rice and a juicy tomato-cucumber salad, which is exactly what I’ll do.
Vegan pesto pasta salad: I make vegan pesto often; I’m not vegan, but I often don’t have cheese (it doesn’t last long around here). Ali Slagle’s recipe gets plenty of umami punch from capers and nuts, and has loads of happy reviews.
Fresh mango pudding: It is mango season, and I am hauling armfuls of them home like the heavy gems they are. The mangoes that I don’t immediately inhale will go into Cybelle Tondu’s delightful pudding, which I’m going to make in my trusty two-quart baking dish (Cybelle provides a tip) for more generous scooping and scarfing.
And before you go
In the interest of showing, not telling — and of riding out this heat wave refreshed and thirst-quenched — here’s Kasia Pilat making her pickle lemonade:
Thanks for reading!
The post Don’t Roast. Rotisserie. appeared first on New York Times.
