Leftover Chicken with Yuppie Salad

Wednesday October 24

We try not to eat the same thing two days in a row, but leftover roast chicken legs, just cold with salt, are so appetizing and easy that it's hard to think of anything better to do. We also had some leftover roasted beets from Saturday, and figured that if the protein was so simple, the vegetable could be complicated. We decided on a salad using the quintessential eighties ingredients: the roasted beets, arugula, and goat cheese (we couldn't work pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes into it, somehow).

Here's the recipe we worked from, substituting arugula for the watercress. Having already-roasted beets saved us a step, and Holt had the ingenious idea of using fresh tarragon in the salad dressing and dried only for the coating for the goat-cheese rounds, which really added to the flavor. The cheese rounds were a bit crumbly, but he patted them together (at room, not "toom," temperature); once rolled in the crumbs and briefly broiled, they made not just the salad, but the whole meal.