Dear Phil - easy pomelo and chicken salad

Mr Martin works long hours, and gets home late at night.  Even though it's pretty cheap (and delicious!) to eat out, after a long day at work trying to find a restaurant and choosing from a menu and summoning waitresses is just not relaxing. It's much better to mooch around in your underwear at home on nights like that.

So a lot of the time, I cook.  Even though I enjoy cooking in my kitchen (it's certainly the nicest kitchen I've ever had - ants 'n' all) it is very limited.  I have one gas ring. And a microwave. And a rice cooker. And of course a kettle and a toaster. And that means that I'm always looking for things I can make with one pot only.

We talk a lot about buying more appliances.  The conversations go like this:

ME

Ooh! Sorbet! If I had a blender I could make sorbet.

MR MARTIN

OK Petal.

ME

You just get your fruit - wonderful tropical fruit like mangos - and mush it up in a blender with some sugar syrup then BAM! Sorbet.

MR MARTIN

OK Petal. Get a blender then.

ME

But then you'll just want me to make you smoothies all the time.
I'm not your smoothie-blending slave you know.

MR MARTIN

Quiet despair

ME

Look! They're making little tarts on  MasterChef.  I could make those if I had an oven. 
I could get one of those little bench-top ovens from the Metro.  You would like those tarts.

MR MARTIN

No. YOU would like them. I don't like tarts.

ME

We both know that's not true.

But actually the real reason I don't just go and buy a blender is that we both still remember the horror that was getting rid of 99% of our personal and household possessions last October so that we could come here.  The more stuff I buy now is just more stuff I'm going to have to jettison at a later date.  It feels like a waste of money - but worse than that - a blender symbolises burden to the unevolved areas of my brain that control my kitchen-appliance-related emotions.  It's just too hard.

The point of this post being that last night I made a delicious one-pot no-blender-required meal of pomelo salad with tender chicken pieces served with steamed white rice.

Mix together: 

• One pomelo - peeled and broken into bits (substitute with grapefruit if you can't get a pomelo. Just be sure to remove all the pith. Grapefruit might not be as sweet, so you may want to add some honey to the dressing.)
• A few cherry tomatoes  halved lengthways.
• Fresh basil, and two kinds of mint - shredded with a knife. Any sweet herbs would do for this though.
• Spring onions. A few. Chopped.
• Garlic - mashed in a mortar and pestle and then stirred with a few tablespoons of olive oil. I used 3-4 cloves, but you might want less.
• Fish sauce - a couple of teaspoonsful.
• Lime juice - one lime's worth.
• About a quarter of a cup of crushed peanuts.
• Lightly fried pieces of chicken breast or tenderloin. If I was fancy I would call it pan-seared.  But really.  You just fry it. Until it's cooked.  You could use prawns as well or instead.

Toss the chicken through the salad and serve while it's still warm.

Enjoy!