Gorgeous, satisfying, fresh, nutritious, satieting and perfectly complete. That’s a Salad Nicoise for you. It’s a classic salad, a signature piece that every good cook personalises, only to incur the wrath of traditionalists. The key elements of my favourite version compliment each other so brilliantly and are so simple that I rarely mess with them. Boiled eggs, a can of tuna and green beans. Soft lettuce leaves, black olives, chopped tomatoes. Dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Learn those ingredients by heart. Salad Nicoise - A Main Meal Salad Looking for the recipe? Scroll all the way down.The traditionalists, apparently, say no to tuna, green beans and potatoes. They want to keep it simple: anchiovies, eggs, and no cooked vegetables at all. Blanched green beans and potatoes, they say, are a travesty. Sacrilege. Change happens, I say, and sometimes for the better. Over it and on with it. That Salad Nicoise has evolved to include a can of tuna rather than salty anchiovies is, in my book, a fine thing.We’re up in the hills at the moment, so the ingredients used for these salads are cheap and easy. Discount supermarket tuna. The pitted black olives are also out of a can. The tomatoes, admittedly, are fresh off the vine - it’s midsummer. And the eggs were from a girlfriend’s Mum - the chooks went a bit silly for a few days. But the lettuce, the green beans and the potatoes are all about as normal as you can find.You could go all upmarket gourmet with a Salad Nicoise and write an essay about it: Char-grilled baby tuna steaks sprinkled with sea salt scraped off the rocks of Normanby. Taggiasche olives picked from century old Ligurian olive trees by 4th generation Pugliese contadini. Organic, slow-roasted cherry tomatoes, each piece blessed with award winning, 70 year old Balsamic Vinegar. New season spuds whose flaky skins and delicate flesh are somehow poetic, and turn the conversation to Van Gogh and the French Impressionists. You get the ...
Salad Nicoise with Tuna, Green Beans and Potato
