Book Club Bites: Salade Nicoise

There’s an important scene in Food Whore where Tia is feeling lost. Her personal life and secret life with Michael Saltz are starting to clash and she’s not sure how she'll sort it out.

Her friend asks her to grab a bite and they go to a nice-ish deli near Washington Square Park. You know, one of the ones with a decent salad bar. As she’s thinking, she absent-mindedly adds items to her container: arugula, tuna, mustard, olives… until she makes an accidental Salade Niçoise.

“I mixed and tasted and went back for other ingredients until the tuna salad was near perfect. It was filling and bracing and pickled. It didn’t taste like bodega food at all. The simple act of cooking and tasting calmed me like nothing else.”

Surprise, surprise, I also love Salade Niçoise. The appeal is its remarkable harmony. Every player is assertive: fragrant tuna, briny olives, meaty haricot verts, plush hard-boiled eggs, spicy arugula. And yet together, they harmonize. The salad surely doesn’t need cheese or bacon, both auto-tune for salad, ways to increase tastiness by masking the ingredients. This is hearty and flavorful, with each component keeping its integrity. 

In my mind, the defining characteristics of a Salade Niçoise are: boiled potatoes, blanched haricot verts, Niçoise olives, hard-boiled eggs, and high-quality tuna. Other people may want to put anchovy in there, but to me, olives and tuna add enough saltiness. Once you have those ingredients, you can really play around with the rest. The recipe below doesn’t have precise proportions -- just mix and match, salad-bar-bodega style.

RECIPE:

Dressing: Using a mortar and pestle, grind three cloves of garlic with one tablespoon of salt until pasty. Add to a bowl along with ⅓ cup of olive oil, 1 minced shallot, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and black pepper to taste. Whisk and set aside.

Boiled Components: If you have the time, you might as well cook everything in the same pot of boiling water (as opposed to having three pots at once, which is somewhat wasteful and adds a lot of unnecessary heat to your kitchen -- critical if you’re making this in the summer).

Add water to a large saucepan and heavily salt. Bring to a boil. Add purple potatoes and four eggs. After 7-10 minutes (depending on how you like your eggs), remove the eggs and cool them off in a bowl of ice water. Add trimmed haricot verts and cook for 2 minutes. Remove and add to another bowl of ice water. Check potatoes with a fork -- the cooking time depends on the size. Remove when a fork easily slips in, with no “crunch” sound.

Before you assemble, cut the eggs in halves or quarters. Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.

Classic Components:
Tomatoes - I like Kumato because they’re sweet and not too tart. But any tomato will do. Cut into wedges.
Radishes 
Cucumber - English or mini. You want a compact cucumber that isn’t too watery.
Olives - I used oil-cured black olives because they are one of my favs. But Niçoise olives are the classic.
Herbs - scallions, basil, chervil

Wildcard Components:
Beets
Fiddlehead ferns
Microgreens - here, I used mustard micro greens
Pickled Cipollini Onions

Assembly:
On a large plate, arrange a bed of arugula. Add your other ingredients. Top with high-quality olive oil-packed tuna. My favorite is this yellowfin tuna from Ortiz. You can buy it at Whole Foods or Zingermans. (True, you can’t find imported Spanish tuna at a bodega salad bar. But just go with it.)

Drizzle with dressing and serve.

Crunchy Spaghetti Squash with Sesame-Seared Ramps

Did you think that spaghetti squash always had to be that consistency? The softness of canned Spaghetti-Os? (I'm not hating!) 

Well... it doesn't. This was a revelation when my brother's girlfriend once brought this to a holiday dinner -- a spaghetti squash salad, with strands that crunched. How did she do it? Were the strands deep-fried? Dehydrated? No... they're just undercooked. Easy as that. 

The original dish has scallions, but I used ramps because 'tis the season. This would be great as a picnic dish -- it's hearty, but clean and fresh. 

RECIPE: 

Bring one large pot of water to a boil. Seed and cut spaghetti squash into 1.5" x 1.5" sections. Add to boiling water. The water will cool off. Leave in the water until the water boils for about 30 seconds (about 3-5 minutes). The spaghetti squash should still be hard (you should be able to insert a fork, but it should crunch, not sink, into the flesh). Soak the spaghetti squash in ice water to stop cooking. Once cool, scrape out strands and place in bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of kosher salt and let sit for 5 minutes. Then squeeze out all the water with your hands. 

In a frying pan, saute chopped ramps in sesame oil. Once fragrant, add to spaghetti squash. Serve warm, cold, or room temperature. 

Spring Roasted Vegetables

But first, a poem. 

Spring (Again) by Michael Ryan

The birds were louder this morning,
raucous, oblivious, tweeting their teensy bird-brains out.
It scared me, until I remembered it’s Spring.
How do they know it? A stupid question.
Thank you, birdies. I had forgotten how promise feels.

My friend who recently moved from NYC to SF told me she's now cooking more. 

"Finally, the recipes I cook turn out well!" she says. 

It wasn't that her skills improved. Or that she tried different recipes. The reason, she says, is that there's better produce on the West Coast. She can make a simple tomato salad, sautéed green beans, the most barebones recipes of Yotam Ottolenghi -- they all turn out great. 

As much as I want to defend NYC farmer's markets, she's probably right -- most of the year. Come spring, it's a different story and one can go wild at the abundance. 

This isn't a recipe as much as it is a shopping prompt. If you've got it it, roast it.

RECIPE:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Prep vegetables, toss with olive oil, and roast them individually in their own trays (as opposed to all at once, as the photo implies). Veggies at the size shown will roast in 12-15 minutes. Sprinkle with Maldon salt. 

Shown: Asparagus, radishes, spring onions, potatoes, fennel, radicchio. 

Blackened Summer Salad

Summer in NYC is not normal, both in the "regular" and "consistent" sense of the word, and in also in the "standard" and "expected" sense of the word.

You might spend a day sunning dreamily in Prospect Park, then in a disturbingly balmy and fragrant subway platform. You might spend two days on the beach, then five days in a freezing office.

Many New Yorkers leave the city on the weekends, true. And sometimes the city can feel pleasantly sparse. Until you hit all the summer tourists.

This dish's ingredients say summer -- corn, basil, tomatoes. But the preparation says something else -- it's deep and charred and moody. It's NYC in the summer.

RECIPE: Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Mandolin one red onion. Slice kernels from one ear of corn. Drop in two handfuls of grape tomatoes. Toss with olive oil and salt. Roast for 40 minutes, until tomatoes burst and the veggies char. I use this stoneware tray that retains heat.

Take out of the oven and put in bowl. Add pesto and chopped parsley. Serves 1 as the main attraction, 2 as a side.