Salad “NEEEEES-WAAAHHHHS”

Hi Lovelies. How is your Tuesday treating you so far?

Salads… the predicament of salads.

I like salads… actually I borderline love salads. It’s not an uncommon sight to see me chomping weeds like Bambi. But something about Salad Week has really turned me off.

Maybe it was the ~~hummus~~ incident. Those ~~damn~~ chickpeas!

I don’t know, but to get to the point it’s now the second week of salads and I made the “Composed Salad” for dinner last night. It was fun. Everything tasted great. Turns out I’m a boss at cooking Tuna on my cast iron grill…. but I’m still not all hot-and-bothered for Salad Week.

**Sigh!**

So let’s quit all this jibber jabber and get to the recipe already.

Salad Nicoise and Quick ‘N’ Dirty Vinaigrette Dressing

Spike teaches this recipe. It makes 4 servings and takes ~30 minutes.

Ingredients

Vinaigrette:

1/2 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 strip of lemon peel
Kosher salt
Freshly Ground Black Pepper

Salad:

1/2 lb green beans, blanched
4 hearts of romaine, grilled
4 small boiled red bliss potatoes, skin on, cut in half
2 roma plum tomatoes, sliced into wedges lengthwise
4 hard boiled eggs, peeled and cut into halves
20 pitted Nicoise olives, I couldn’t find Nicoise so I used Kalamata
1/3 red onion, finely sliced
2 Ahi Tuna steaks, thawed (or 1 sushi-grade tuna steak)

Directions

Combine all vinaigrette ingredients in a jar and shake vigorously until emulsified. Set aside and allow garlic and lemon to infuse the vinaigrette while you prepare the salad.

Heat a large sauce pan over medium high heat. Once boiling add potatoes and eggs to water. Boil the eggs for ~13 minutes and remove. Continue boiling potatoes another 3 minutes, until a knife will stick in and pull out easily then remove and set aside.

Heat a large griddled skillet over high heat and add oil. Season the tuna with salt, pepper and olive oil and place on the hot pan searing each side for 10-12 seconds on each side. Remove the tuna and set aside to rest.

Fill a sauce pan with water and heat to medium high eat. Heavily salt the water. Place green beans in the boiling water for a few minutes. Then remove and immediately place in a bowl of icy water. This is BLANCHING people. Shock the green beans to leave them crispy.

Remove the outer leaves from the Romaine Hearts. Rinse the remaining heart, cut off the dark green leave tips and the base. Place on the grill and rotate every few seconds to get a nice sear on the outer leaves. Remove. You can give each person a whole romaine heart or you can slice all of them and compose the greens on a large salad plate like I did.

Take a large platter and compose the greens on the plate to form a base layer. Sprinkle with sliced red onion then arrange egg, tomato, and potatoes on the plate so the ingredients are all evenly spaced apart. Slice the tuna and add to the platter. Finish by arranging pitted olives in the gaps around the salad.
Season with salt and pepper and drizzle vinaigrette over and around the plate.