A fantastic chicken sandwich

All recipes copyright Anna Vaught.

Oh -- it's the first day, so have an extra recipe. This is for an early tea on a summer's day -- with a bit of background 'chicken' information! So you're down with my frugality!

A fantastic chicken sandwich.

You take a large white roll or, perhaps, a cheese bread or the kind of bread roll my (American)_ husband calls a kaiser: one encrusted with caramelised onions. Then, you spread it pretty generously with butter or, if you must, some marg. Add lots of soft lettuce -- the old fashioned kind. If you are growing lettuce, you could use some early leaves. I also added some handfuls of mint (remove the stalks) and some chives that I had coming up. Also, some little dandelion leaves from the garden (really, you need to blanch these under a pot, but if you pick them when they're really tiny...). Little sorrel leaves would also be good. Sorrel is hard to buy but easy to grow: it looks like spinach but has a sharp lemon tang.

If you made this sandwich later in summer, you could add some sweet local toms. I used some vine tomatoes that were big and squashy and not those woolly things (but imported --I'm not perfect). Right, shred some chicken with your hands (oh go on), add the tomatoes and then the chicken and sprinkle the lot with crystals of Maldon sea salt and add some grindings of pepper. Close up the sandwich and squish -- a little. It's just best in a soft roll.

It seemed, shall we say, cosy, to have this with a big mug of tea. Yorkshire being the brew of choice.

Now, that CHICKEN. I had roasted it, a large free ranger, last night, when it made meals for two adults and two children. There's still some more meat on there, so the rest -- brown and white-- will be going into a curry with little brown chick peas (gughni) tomorrow. Then I'll make stock and be glad I did. To make the stock, I'll just cover the carcass with water, add a small handful of black pepppercorns and a couple of bay leaves. But experiment. Though not too much. Freeze it afterwards?