Tuna Salad Nicoise

At the mention of an entrée salad for dinner, Jim’s eyes perk up. I find his funny, since I normally have to force a side-salad on him as an accompaniment to dinner (sometimes I let him get away with his lame excuse for not having one—“I probably shouldn’t; I had all that cheese before dinner and I’m kind of full”—but sometimes I insist). An entrée salad at home will usually involve a healthy dose of salad greens, with a greater variety of additional vegetable toppings than I typically add to side salads, some kind of hot meat or fish and a homemade salad dressing. The entrée salads that I’ve prepared in the past have been absolute hits, so the suggestion of a Tuna Salad Nicoise for Monday night was met with immediate agreement on his part. We had a fairly heavy weekend of food and drink, and a salad seemed like a cleansing option for the end of the weekend.

I’ll begin by saying that I don’t know what exactly constitutes a Tuna Salad Nicoise. (Nicoise, as Jim and I found out after Googling it on Sunday, means “as prepared in Nice, France”—he asked me, I didn’t know and Google, as always, provided a link to a quick answer). I’ve seen them on restaurant menus, in magazines and on cooking programs, and know that they will typically contain new potatoes, cooked green beans, nicoise olives and seared tuna (among other things) atop a bed of greens with some sort of vinaigrette dressing. So, that provided a starting point, at least…but I like to have fun with these entrée salads, so we’ll likely be adding much more than that.

Our salad would include the basics that I mentioned above: lightly steamed green beans (I like my veggies crunchy, so they still resemble vegetables), new potatoes seasoned with pepper and poached on the stovetop in vegetable broth, chopped nicoise olives (the Whole Foods olive bar is the best, bar none) and tuna coated with cracked pepper and seared rare. In addition to these components, I added the following:

• Chopped jarred roasted red peppers (I love these things—they make a great addition to just about anything; as long as you’re careful to buy them packed in water, not oil; and there’s little or no prep involved. Haddon House makes a great water-packed jarred roasted red pepper. When you pull them from the jar, you get a full red pepper—not pepper pieces as I’ve experienced with Cento and other brands.)
• Cremini mushrooms poached whole in vegetable broth and then sliced (we’ve really been enjoying hot mushrooms on salads recently—they’re so juicy and the hot mushrooms add so much to a salad otherwise composed of cold inputs
• Frozen artichoke hearts, defrosted and poached in vegetable broth (noticing a theme here? I used the same pan and the same medium to cook/heat all of the ingredients that required it; as one ingredient was done cooking it was put aside and the next was up for cooking—one pan, little clean up.)
• Caramelized red and Vidalia onions (see the Pizza entry for instructions on their preparation)
• A few chopped almonds, for texture contrast (and great flavor; almonds are just divine)
• The typical salad fixings assortment of diced cucumber, carrot and bell pepper (I keep a contained of pre-prepped salad fixings in the fridge at all times, so salad preparation is always fast and easy—so this was ready and waiting for me)

I had about three quarters of a pound of tuna medallions, which I coated with cracked pepper and seared in the same pan I used to heat all of the warm inputs listed above (wiped clean first, of course, because you wouldn’t get a searing with all that liquid in the pan—we weren’t going for steamed tuna tonight). We love our tuna rare, and that’s how most of it turned out. One of the pieces was a bit smaller and I should have pulled it sooner, so it would have been at our desired level of “doneness”. Oh, well; next time. Even not-so-rare tuna tastes good…

The salad dressing was a strawberry balsamic concoction. A few months ago we had some pears in the fridge that were nearing their end, so I prepared an entrée salad using grilled chicken, sliced pears, bleu cheese and walnuts, and topped with a strawberry dressing I threw together. The salad was good. The dressing was spectacular. For this salad, I tried to repeat that glory. I halved about 6 strawberries (I quartered the larger ones), and added these to my mini food processor with about 2 T of balsamic vinegar, a bunch of fresh thyme stripped from the stems, about 6 cloves of roasted garlic (I had popped a head in the oven earlier while I prepared other items; now it was out and cool enough to handle), about a quarter cup of orange juice, about 1 t of fennel seed and about a tablespoon of whole grain mustard. I blended these ingredients in the food processor until smooth, adding extra liquid and flavoring as needed until the dressing was just right. Presto: salad dressing. The mini food processor is a great item to have for these types of preparations; it’s small, easy to handle and easy to clean (easier than the gigantic Cuisinart, at least). I gave Jim an early taste, with my usual question put forth: “do you want this on your salad?” Affirmative.

We had some toasted bread with our salads, with a spread of goat cheese on top. Goat cheese has such a pleasant tang, and is naturally lower in fat and calories than most other cheeses. We use it often in grilled cheese sandwiches (I make grilled cheese sans butter—just a spray of olive oil; this is why I usually refer to them as “hot cheese sandwiches” at home, to avoid confusion), omelets, and even atop tacos, etc. I’ve actually just about replaced my cream cheese for toast with goat cheese; it spreads almost as well, has a ton more flavor and is a little less processed than cream cheese.

This was our Memorial Day meal, the last hoorah of a three-day weekend before the inevitable and painful return to work. At least this week is only four days long…that makes it a bit easier to stomach. Now we can spend these next four days dreaming of next weekend…