Smoked Mackerel, Cheddar Cheese and Bacon Caesar Salad

I admit, this salad don't look pretty.

On certain days of the week, I'm busy doing not much - my sister's friend Alex calls these days 'Bedroom Admin' days - and on these days I often forget to eat lunch. Which means a 3pm rummage around the fridge to assemble whatever I find, and either get lucky, or end up eating a Scotch egg with a packet of rice cakes.

Today was the luckiest day. I managed to find almost all the ingredients you would expect to find in a Caesar salad, and some extra ones that you might not. Never mind, everything combined and complimented each other like a dream, and although not the Scarlett Johansson of lunches, looks-wise I would still call this salad a Katie Price - a bit of a mess, but you still would, wouldn't you?

Taste-wise, however, this salad is a Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley - so flawless, that you think it may have been manufactured. But why wouldn't you put smoked mackerel in a Caesar salad? You put in anchovies, and a mackerel is just a huge anchovy. The rest of the ingredients are just store cupboard staples- even the bacon is that cooked sandwich strip stuff, perfect for this recipe. No traditional parmesan in the fridge? No problem, grated cheddar will do.

In five minutes flat, I had made an enormous portion of this conglomeration of ingredients, and since I had a bottle of Caesar salad dressing in the fridge, I'm calling it a 'Caesar salad'. If I only had had oil and vinegar, this dish would have been called a 'Salad' instead.

Cost-wise, this is on budget at £3 per ginormous serving. It would have been cheaper if I had cooked some bacon from raw, used block cheese instead of pre-grated. and omitted the mackerel. But I didn't. Delicious!

Serves 1

INGREDIENTS:

1 little gem lettuce
1 smoked mackerel fillet, flaked into 2cm pieces
4 strips cooked bacon, broken up into 2cm pieces
75g tin of anchovies
100g grated cheddar cheese
100g croutons
100ml Caesar salad dressing
Black pepper (no need for salt)

Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl and eat with gusto.