Rukmini Iyer’s quick and easy recipe for crispy butter bean, chorizo and cos salad | Quick and easy

In the happiest and tastiest of accidents, what began as an experiment in reinventing the caesar salad turned into a quick favourite supper

I was thinking of billing this as a caesar salad with an extreme makeover. One night, I started making a caesar salad, then wondered what would happen if I made a coriander-pesto mayonnaise and mugged off the anchovies in favour of chorizo. Then I thought about turning it into a full meal, at which point it stopped being anything like a caesar salad. If you’d prefer a vegetarian version, choose a vegetarian parmesan and omit the chorizo in favour of a heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika and a scant teaspoon of sea salt flakes.