Believe it or not, we didn't have many leftovers following Sunday's Father's Day feast. The brisket and beer-can chicken, gone. Green salad, fini. The only thing Jon and I were long on was the smoked salmon, so I figured a Monday night Nicoise Salad was in order. (Obviously, we swapped the traditional tuna for our salmon.)
I ate my first Nicoise Salad in Paris, at the age of 13. I ordered it because its simple ingredients were some of the only French vocabulary I recognized off the menu: hericot verts were green beans, oeuf was an egg, et cetera, etc. Blame my Irish heritage, but to this day pomme de terre (literal translation: apples of the earth), or potato, is still one of my favorite French phrases to say.
But I digress. To make last night's Nicoise Salad I adapted a recipe from (who else??) Julia Child. Without further ado...
Salad:
1 head Boston lettuce, washed and patted dry
handful of green beans, halved and steamed
2 red potatoes, boiled, peeled, and quartered
2 eggs, hard-boiled, sliced
1 shallot, minced
handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
1-2 anchovy filets, diced
handful of black Kalamata olives
2-3 T. capers
leftover smoked salmon
Dressing:
1/3 cup olive oil
3 T. Champagne vinegar
1 T. Dijon mustard
2-3 T. shallots, finely chopped
juice from half a lemon
freshly ground pepper, to taste
salt, to taste
For the salad, simply place the ingredients on a plate. For the dressing, pulse all the ingredients in a blender to better bind them. Drizzle over the salad, enjoy!