Steak, chickpea and avocado salad

I've always found it tricky to find good things to take into work for lunch, so tempting to just resort to buying something but my favourite sushi place leaves me nearly £10 worse off a day (not totally clean and lean I know but I let that one slide)! I find the best option is to use leftovers, better yet to transform leftovers into a brand new lunch. The below was after we had steak and salad for dinner. Having been veggie for years I still don't manage a full steak so I used my leftovers to make a very tasty lunch!

Steak, chickpea and avocado salad

Ingredients:

Steak cooked rare

Chickpeas (tinned are fine)

Avocado

Cherry tomatoes

Grilled pepper (I use the ones out of a jar but if you are strict then you can do a DIY version)

Little gem lettuce

Jalapeños (again I use jarred)

Toasted pine nuts

Zatar spice mix

Dijon mustard - 1 tsp

Balsamic vinegar

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt and Pepper

Method:

Take your leftover steak (or cooked and cooled if you are doing this from scratch), place it between two sheets of clingfilm and bash it thin with a rolling pin - always a satisfying task!

Once you've thinned your steak out cut into small strips and set aside.

Drain your chickpeas, put them in the salad bowl with a little of the oil and the zatar power, stir through.

Slice up your remaining salad ingredients (avocado, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, jalapeños) - I like to shred the lettuce then artfully (aka randomly) chop everything else!

Add your salad ingredients to the bowl with the chickpeas and stir through so everything gets a bit of seasoning on.

Put your mustard, a good glug of balsamic and about twice the amount of oil into a jam jar (or any receptacle you might prefer) - if you need some kind of measurement I'd say 50ml balsamic and 100ml olive oil as a guesstimate (you will have a lot of spare dressing) - add your salt and pepper, put the lid on and give it a good shake.

Dress your salad, toss through again, add the beef strips and toasted pine nuts and serve (or if you're doing it for lunch at work follow the method above but keep your dressing and pine nuts separate until you're ready to eat so your salad ingredients don't go soft).

NB: If you want to do your peppers from scratch you will need to blacken them under a very hot grill or on a gas flame cooker, once the skin has turned black transfer to a bowl (carefully!) and cover with clingfilm. Let them cool then it will be easy to peal off the blackened outside, you can remove the stalk and any easily accessed seeds and you'll have your lovely roasted peppers ready to use!