Weeknight Cooking

Nicoise Salad


When the mood is French, the taste is for tuna, and you feel like saying the word Nicoise (little squiggly emphasis mark underneath the 'c') out loud a few times for fun, then gather up a good bunch of kale, some green fresh beans, little potatoes – red or yellow – eggs, tomatoes, anchovies, garlic, olives, a pinch of lemon, and a favorite

dressing to drizzle. Most important, some good fresh tuna.  In the description to this recipe, it suggests that Nicoise salad is set apart from the mixed salad because the components are set on the plate somewhat for the sake of the look of the plate, but also so to allow each of the ingredients to stand strongly on their own.  That is, the green bean tastes just as it is: a good cooked green bean.  A slice of hard boiled egg is its own flavor; the tuna, a fine meat selection.  Even though this might have a French name, it is a type of salad that is very much in the 'local' vogue right now – simple, quite raw, good for you, and if you are lucky enough to find fresh local produce, so much the better.

Key hints to success are to first boil a pound of red potatoes until tender, quarter them, season, drizzle on some olive oil, then broil until crisp on the outside, this way the surface carrying crisp flavor.  Another is to

sautee minced garlic, a pinch of anchovies and chopped olives to provide the base for a batch of cooked kale.  What comes out of the fry pan becomes the important 'salty' base of the salad plate.  The last is the careful preparation of the tuna steaks.  Tuna is very easy to over cook because it is difficult to follow the cooking instructions for only one and a half minutes of pan time per side, but this does allow for that ruby red middle which, if warm, is the perfect preparation because it too allows for the real taste of the steak to come through.  In the end, it is a salad of taste choices.  You find your own favorite fork combinations as you go along.  The heavy starchiness of the potatoes contrast the crisp kale; the egg and tomato play well off each other; the crisp green beans are helped along by the coating of oil, vinaigrette or lemon.  Kids, oddly enough, eat it.