A Recipe for When You Want a Sandwich but Should Maybe Eat a Salad

Kia Damon’s chicken gyro chopped salad.Credit…Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Samantha Seneviratne.

When I’m really hungry but know I should eat something green because breakfast was two chocolate chip cookies and lunch was cold pizza, a fun dinner game I play is “Will it salad?” The premise is simple: Can I turn the thing I really want to eat (tacos, a bagel and cream cheese, falafel, more pizza) into a salad?

The answer is usually yes — I just need to mix the main characters with lettuce or tender leafy greens and stretch the sauce element into a dressing. But it helps to have guidance so I get the perfect proportions, which is why I’m thankful for Kia Damon’s new chicken gyro chopped salad.

The key gyro components — seared, assertively seasoned meat, juicy tomatoes and cucumbers, a creamy tzatziki-style dressing — are piled on crunchy, refreshing romaine. Pita bread’s here, too, as crispy pita chips. If you want to make your meal vegetarian, swap in firm tofu or cauliflower for the chicken. Chicken gyro — it does salad!

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Chicken Gyro Chopped Salad

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Another dinner game I’ve been playing lately is “Can I use summer produce to offset my anxiety about how quickly we’re sliding into the end of the year?” I’m happy to share that I’m winning that game, too (for now). Kia’s roasted shrimp with okra and tomatoes is on my to-cook list, mostly because it looks terrifically simple but also because I recently discovered that I do, in fact, like okra. This helpful tip from Kia explains why I wasn’t so keen on it before: “When choosing okra, go for the smaller-to-medium size pods. The bigger the okra, the more likely it is to be stringy and tough.”