September 7, 2014 Dinner   New Recipe   Salad Nicoise

Saturday morning we bought an assortment of fingerling potatoes, four large stalks of rhubarb and three beautiful tomatoes ($3.00/lb.) at the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market.  When we returned to Albuquerque on Saturday afternoon we went to Costco and bought a piece of fresh deep red Aji tuna ($13.99/lb.), a box of strawberries and a 1 lb. box of organic greens, with the intention of making Salad Nicoise.

Sunday morning we ate our usual bacon, lettuce, and tomato salad in the garden.  Suzette had used only one-half of the beautiful yellow and red tomatoes because she wanted to save the rest for our Salad Nicoise.

In the afternoon I spoke to Billy while Suzette walked to the Arts and Craft show at Robinson Park near our house and then walked down the alley and picked a bowl full of green figs.

When she returned around 3:30 she took a little nap.  At 4:30 Suzette started making her rhubarb and strawberry compote for the cobbler we decided to make on Monday night, while I made a fruit salad with the papaya, pineapple and oranges we had bought at Pro’s Ranch Market last week. Suzette sliced and added the rest of the strawberries she did not need for her rhubarb and strawberry compote into the fruit salad.

After the rhubarb and strawberry compote was cooked and the fruit salad made, around 5:30 we decided to start the Salad Nicoise, so it would be ready to eat by the beginning of 60 Minutes. 

Suzette started preparing the Salad Nicoise by bringing to a boil, a handful of fingerling potatoes and two eggs.  Then she heated peanut oil and seared the tuna filet until just the outside was cooked and the inside was still red.  She sliced the yellow and red tomatoes into wedges and she peeled a cucumber and made long cucumber wedges.  I fetched some PPI string beans from last Monday’s meal and she re-heated them with the tuna and garnished the salad with the tuna and string beans, tomatoes, cucumber slices and egg slices.  I wanted olives so I fetched the container of Kalamata olives and placed about eight or nine on my salad.  

   

Salad Nicoise 

1  4 oz. Tuna filet per salad

1/2 cup of fingerling potatoes (cut into slices)

1 egg per salad (cut into slices)

Sliced tomatoes cut into wedges

Cucumber sticks

1/2 cup of string beans boiled and sautéed and cut into 1” pieces

1 cup of salad per bowl

Olives:  traditionally, small Nicoise olives are used, but since we had none, I added pitted Greek Kalamata olives from Costco.   Suzette did not add any olives to her salad, so they are optional.

Suzette placed organic salad greens in two large pasta bowls and then laid the other ingredients on the greens.  Suzette used an egg slicer to cut slice uniform slices of potatoes and egg.  By the end the process the surface of the lettuce was covered with all the array of ingredients and then garnished with the seared tuna.

Basil/ Balsamic Dressing:

I wanted to emphasize the tomatoes, so I went to the garden and picked

8-9 large basil leaves and sliced them crossways into thin strips.  I then added finely minced

5 – 6 small cloves of garlic and added about

1 ½ Tbsps. of red Balsamic vinegar and a

dash of pepper and salt to taste, and whipped the vinegar and oil, as I drizzled in about

½ cup of olive oil (we considered and rejected the addition of Dijon mustard),

to make a very simple dressing.

We each dressed our salads and I fetched the PPI bottle of 2010 Leese-Fitch Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge and we carried our bowls of salad and glasses of white wine to the table in the TV room and watched 60 Minutes.  

After 60 Minutes at 7:00 p.m. it was twilight and the solar lights surrounding the pond had come on and a nearly full moon had risen in the eastern sky and the setting was quite beautiful.

We had heard Dr. Gupta discuss the horrors of sugar on Fareek Zacharia’s Sunday morning show on CNN, so Suzette made dessert by cross cutting two cuts into each of 6 figs and putting a dab of creamy French Le Delice (Costco $10.99?/lb.) cheese into each and poured out the rest of the Fonseca Bin No. 27 fine reserve port into small port glasses (Good port often is unfiltered, so there will be a large amount of sediment that is thrown off in the bottle.  Traditionally one decants the port, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the bottle.  Otherwise, someone will usually get a small amount of sediment in their glass, as I did this evening.)

We took the plate of figs and the glasses of port to the gazebo area in our garden and listened to the sound of summer insects and watched twilight turn to nigh and the nearly full moon and the moon’s reflection on the surface of the pond for a while, as we enjoyed the end of our leisurely day spent at home.   We both commented on what an enjoyable weekend it had been.

Bon Appétit