Salad Nicoise

All right, I have been waiting to post on this because I think it's the best summertime dish I've ever made. Salad nicoise is cool, beautiful to look at and has a thousand little flavors going on. It's also pretty simple--just get each ingredient ready and assemble everything on a big platter. I'm looking forward to making it for a dinner party--I think it would be really fun to make a huge one and have people over for a casual get-together. Some bread and a fruity summertime dessert plus a crisp wine (maybe vinho verde, my new favorite cheap summer drink?) and you're in business. Please enjoy! Salad nicoise is a composed dressed salad usually with tuna, potato, green beans, tomato, egg, nicoise olives and some other tangy thing, like capers. Some people, like Julia Child, also use anchovies but Phil is anchovy adverse, so I left them out. It is also typically made with oil-packed canned tuna, but I used a fresh filet instead, seared outside and quite rare in the middle, as you'll see. It would be great grilled too. Anyway, start by prepping the potato and green beans because you'll need to boil them and it's good to get the hot stove part out of the way first. Trim your green beans on the diagonal if you like, to french-ify them. Wash the potatoes (I used Yukon Gold because that's what I had but red potatoes are more traditional and hold their shape better) and prick them a few times all over with a fork. Bring a big pot of well-salted water to a boil and drop in your potatoes, then turn the heat down to simmer them. Boil them whole because you'll be slicing them up later--and they'll get all mushy and water-logged if you cut them up to cook. By the way, the ingredient amounts here are for just two people. This is a very flexible dish that you can just increase the amounts on for as many people as you like. Count on about 1 potato per person, 1 egg per person, 1 tomato per person, about 1/4 pound green beans per person, and so on. While the potatoes are simmering (it should take about 30 minutes) you can prepare the dressing. Slice one small onion into very thin slices and mince up 2 cloves garlic. In a jar, combine 3 tablespoons cider vinegar with 1 tablespoon dijon mustard and a little less than 1/2 cup olive oil (about 6-7 tablespoons). Add salt and fresh ground pepper. Dump in your thin slices of onion and the minced garlic and then shake it all up together and set aside. You can taste and see at this point, since we're just waiting on the potatoes anyway--does it need more vinegar or olive oil or maybe some salt? Oh, here's a done potato! Don't drain, but fish them out with tongs and bring the water back up to boil... ...and add in your green beans, just for long enough to turn them bright green--about 2 minutes. Now you can drain the water! After your potatoes are a bit cooled off and you can handle them, slice into thin rounds. You'll need some hardboiled eggs, which I happened to already have on hand. If you don't have them handy, you can cook them before the potatoes--just add them to the boiling water, then turn off the heat and cover for 10 minutes. Fish out the eggs and let them cool off in the fridge while you bring the water back up to a boil for the potatoes and proceed from there. Peel the eggs and slice into wedges or rounds. Slice up some tomatoes (I used 2 big romas) and now we're ready to assemble! By the way, can you imagine this salad at the very peak of summer made from the best stuff at the farmers market? Perfect tiny green beans, the sweetest tomatoes, maybe even with some little new potatoes...delicious.
Drizzle a little bit of the dressing on a serving platter. And sort of turn the green beans around in there to get coated nicely. Then you get creative! Sometimes people make designs with the components of a salad nicoise, or sometimes they group stuff together--a pile of green beans,a pile of potatoes, and so on. Me? I'm into making a design. Spokes of green beans, then lay out potatoes in between... Then dot with the eggs... And tomato wedges... And scatter about olives! Sadly I did not have real nicoise olives. For some reason Whole Foods doesn't carry them? Should have tried Alon's instead, I guess. Anyway, use small black olives, if you can't find real nicoise ones. And I added capers! Small ones and big ones! This is a big caper berry up close! I like them. Phil does not. But I had already sacrificed the inclusion of anchovies (which, by the way, if you are using, you would just lay out in strips here at this point) so I wasn't going to give up on caper berries as well. They just taste like salty, huge olives, so I don't know why he doesn't like them. And now that our salad is pretty much assembled, let's take care of the tuna! I used a very small piece of fresh tuna (a little less than 1/2 pound) for two people. Get a heavy pan, coat well with olive oil and heat up on high heat until very hot. Salt and pepper the tuna steak and set it right on the hot pan. You want to get a nice sear on the outside but leave the middle very pink. Flip it over after a minute and a half. It should have a lovely brown crust but a red center. Let it cook on the other side for just another minute or so, then remove from heat.Slice it up...it sort of looks like tuna tataki!
And fan it out in the center of your composed salad. Beautiful. Just check that out, will you? Drizzle a bit more of the dressing over all and sit yourselves down for a lovely night.

Crispy pan-fried tofu

Tofu! So polarizing. I love it deeply but I recognize there's times when it needs to up the texture factor. Here's how I make it a crispy delight--particularly suitable for dipping or adding to your favorite stirfry.Maybe people would love it more if they realized that it's basically just cheese? Look at it! Like a giant square-shaped fresh mozzarella. Wetness is an enemy of crispy frying so the first thing to do is get the tofu as drained as you can. Cut it in half and lay it out in a paper-towel lined colander.Put another layer of paper towels on the top surface of the tofu slices and weigh it down with something heavy, like big tomato cans or something. I used my Alterra coffee canister that Jocelyn gave me years ago as a going away present when I left Milwaukee. It does have a pound of coffee in it so it's good and heavy right now.After at least 30 minutes, your tofu should be really well drained. But please note--even if you don't have time to drain the tofu or just didn't think of it or whatever, you can still squeeze the tofu and get some water out of it. It won't be totally dry but it's better than nothing. Cut the slices into cubes of whatever size you like. Smaller will be crispier. I went for medium size ones here.Mix up equal parts four and nutritional yeast flakes with salt and pepper in a big bowl. This is 1/4 cup each. After the flour and nutritional yeast is blended, add in your tofu chunks.Toss 'em around, get them good and covered.Heat up a good 1/4 cup of canola oil in a huge pan. You want to get it really good and hot. Sizzly.If your pan is big enough, you can do all the tofu at once. Otherwise just work in two batches. You don't want to crowd them or they'll just be soggy and greasy instead of crisp.If you oil is hot enough, they'll sizzle when they hit it and start turning golden brown right away. Flip them over after a few minutes--take a look at the bottom of one or two first to see if they're the right color. You can see a couple of mine got a little bit too toasty--I think I left them on for about 4 minutes before flipping over.Take them off and drain well on paper towels. That's the boo thing about frying--you end up using a lot of paper towels which always makes me feel wasteful. Check it out! Perfectly golden squares of crispy tofu. They'll be the crispiest right after they're cooked so don't let them sit around too long. Like I said, smaller pieces will brown up faster and be more crisp so you may want to experiment. One yummy thing to do is to use them to dip in peanut sauce, sort of like tofu satay. Or in any stir fry, which is what we did that night--in a spicy sauce with brown rice and snap peas.

Warm tortellini salad

This is a recipe for keeping the house cool during summertime cooking--fast cooking fresh tortellini tossed with a few rich ingredients that don't need to go on the stove. I don't want to call it a pasta salad because that sounds like a side you'd order under duress at a sandwich place ("umm, you can choose between potato chips, or coleslaw or pasta salad"). It's more like a room-temperature pasta dish, and it will gladly travel with you to potluck BBQ parties or to the office for lunch for the rest of the summer.Fresh tortellini are best because they'll cook in 5 minutes or less and their flavor is usually better. Sicilians say the shape of a tortellina is meant to evoke the navel of Venus, but sicilians say a lot of things. They are really pretty though. Get 1/2 cup of frozen fresh green peas or butter beans because they'll cook up at the same rate as the tortellini. Bring a big pot of well salted water to a boil and add the beans and tortellini on in there together. Friends taking a bath together.It should only take 5 minutes before the pasta is ready to drain. Then you can turn off your stove and never speak of it again. After you drain the pasta and beans, and while they're still hot, dress them with a good few tablespoons of olive oil. This will prevent stickiness and makes the pasta more flavorful.You can easily omit this part for a vegetarian version, but I like to add about 1/4 cup of salami, cut into thin matchsticks.Components: 1/2 cup ricotta salata or queso fresco, the afore-mentioned (and omittable) 1/4 cup salami, 1/2 cup chopped sun dried tomatoes, 4 leaves basil, 1/4 cup chopped parsley, and the juice from 1 lemon. Add the salami and the sundried tomatoes to the tortellini while still hot--the heat from the pasta is needed to best bring out the flavors for these dried ingredients.After it cools down a little bit, add in all the rest of your ingredients, crumbling up the cheese as you go. Toss it all together and see if it needs more salt (all this stuff is pretty salty so I think you should season to taste to make sure no one strokes out after eating dinner). Add some fresh ground black pepper right before serving.It will probably taste even better the next day, after flavors have melded a bit. This is a great make-ahead dish or for lunch the next day...if you can keep people from eating it all right away out of the serving bowl.