Smoked Chicken Salad For The Soul

Sitting in bed at the end of a ten hour day at work I'm thinking about my next couple of weeks to come. It looks like there won't be a day off for another three weeks, and holidays are well and truly over. I cant believe how quickly they have gone, and how quickly all my week days have filled up again. Its a little bit scary, but at the same time very exciting to see all of my little plans starting to take life. I have so much work in front of my, but some of it is so fun that its hard to call it work.......for example, in about a weeks time I am launching a range of my sugar cookies at little cup cakes. I'll keep you posted with the details of this, because I want you all to rush in and by them off the shelves so that it looks like I'm a huge huge success.

With all these things in front of me I've been thinking about the idea of working heard. I always knew that coming to Melbourne would be difficult at times (or even all the time.) I knew I would miss my family. I knew I would be broke at times. I knew I would have to work like crazy and I knew it would be a little bit lonely before I met all the wonderful friends I now have. I didn't understand what this meant though. I think I had an idealised idea of 'work.' I was so keen to get stuck into pulling together this little career that I idealised hard work into something of a movie montage. You know the sort where there is music playing in the background and lots of snap shots of wonderful things being achieved. Everything always comes together so quickly in these montages, making it look like hard work is just one eventful moment in time. This however doesn't seem to be the case. The more I work hard towards the things I want, the more I realise that there is no one moment where you are pulling everything together, or when everything makes sense. However its just a process of slowly applying the things that are important to your life everyday. When you look at it like this, its actually pretty simple. It can be harder to apply because it takes persistence, but this is kind of beautiful. 

So right now, I'm appreciating this simple slow beauty of just getting done all the things I need to get done, and enjoying them. When It gets too overwhelming though (I had a bit of a night of feeling like that recently) this is what I do:

Make a smoked Chicken and ricotta Salad.

You will need:

One smoked chicken breast

Half a bunch of asparagus 

1/4 cup of fresh green peas

1/4 lemon

salt and pepper

olive oil

1/4 cup of ricotta (from the deli) broken into little chunks

Heat a frypan with some olive oil

Break of the thick uneatable ends of the asparagus and add it to the pan. Cook for five minutes stirring from time to time. Add the fresh peas and continue to stir for two minutes.

Add the juice from the lemon.

Season

Cut the smoked chicken breast into 5 pieces and add to the pan. Cook for two minutes to heat the chicken through.

Add the chunks of ricotta and stir.

Take of the heat and pile it all onto your plate. 

Delicious!