Herbed roasted chicken with beet-feta-orzo salad and green beens.

I should consider calling this “dinner on Sunday” instead of “dinner tonight.” My new schedule has been keeping me so busy that I really don’t have time to cook until the weekend and on Saturdays, I’m usually more concerned with catching up on the other things I’ve missed doing during the week. Like reading.

But, at the sacrifice of precious time I could be spending with my head in a book (only twenty pages left!), I decided to make dinner tonight. The roasted chicken from last week was so good that I wanted something similar again. I stuffed some minced herbs under the skin in the morning: fresh sage, thyme, oregano and garlic. The kitchen smelled incredible afterwards. I just realized that I forgot to pop the lemon I bought in the cavity before I roasted it. C’est la vie.

The beet salad was really the “star” of the meal though. I saw this recipe a few weeks back and made a mental note to myself. It sounded like a good combination. So tonight I went about making it based on what I remembered. I roasted the beets. I used shallots. Skipped the pine nuts completely. Seasoned to taste and I tasted a lot along the way because this salad is hard to put down. I was tempted to skip the chicken and just eat this instead.