Shredded chicken, cannellini, and rocket salad

Every office has a Davide.

Davide owns the third shelf of the shared fridge. Not officially, there was never a vote, but everybody knows. His containers are the good glass kind with the clip-down lids. They are labelled. He has, on at least one recorded occasion, relocated somebody else's bag of salad to make room and left it on top of the fridge, where it remained for nine days as a warning to others.

Davide is also, infuriatingly, correct about lunch. While the rest of the floor is queueing at 13:15 for a nine euro sandwich in soggy cardboard, Davide is at his desk with a glass box of something that looks like it came from a place with a wine list. He has never once appeared to flag at 15:00. He does not do the four o'clock walk to the vending machine. Do not resent Davide. Become Davide.

This is a Davide salad, and it takes about eight minutes because the chicken is already cooked. It is built to use the second half of the meat from the poached chicken leg in the pastina soup, but any leftover roast chicken does the job and so does the last third of a supermarket rotisserie bird bought on its way to being reduced.

Shredded chicken, a tin of cannellini beans, red onion soaked in cold water so it stops shouting, a great deal of olive oil, lemon, and rocket thrown in at the last possible moment. The beans are what make this a meal rather than a diet: they carry the oil, they fill you up properly, and they cost about thirty cents.

Dress it the night before. Almost nothing else in this book gets that instruction, because dressing a salad early normally ruins it, but beans are not lettuce. They drink the dressing overnight and improve on it. Keep the rocket in a separate corner of the box and fold it through at your desk, ideally while Davide watches, approving.