It's not salade nicoise, but it's good: tuna, bean, potato and beet salad

Way back in 2008, Annalena wrote a short series of notes on the "canon," and wrote a bit about French canonical dishes. One of them was salade nicoise. If you go back to that one (and you're gonna have to go back to a few notes to finish this recipe), you'll see her concerns about getting into battles about proper French cooking. And with good reason. This is NOT an area of cooking on which Annalena feels she is on secure ground.

I bring that up because, when I told the Guyman what we were eating for dinner, his first response was "Oh. GOOD. We're having salade nicoise." My response was "well, not sure I'd call it that. You can if you want, but I'm just going to list the ingredients in the salad." Indeed, if you go back and look at the original post on nicoise, you'll see mention of how black olives and hard boiled eggs seem to be required ingredients in the salad, and anchovies in the dressing. None of that is here. Rather, there are a lot of good things that make it LOOK like it COULD be a salad nicoise, but it's not. SO, here we go.

First, let's look at tuna. If you go back on this blog, you will find a recipe for tuna confit. You're going to need to make that. If you don't want to (but you really should make it once), then get a couple of cans of GOOD quality tuna in olive oil. Get an Italian brand, but try not to be fooled into buying bluefin. Do not get me wrong: that tuna, as I remember it, is wonderful, but bluefin tuna is on the edge of extinction. Let's not help it along.

You are also going to need to go WAY back on the blog, for how Annalena steam roasts her beets. I like to use different colors, but if you only have one, use one. And if you are only going to use one color, I would suggest using the yellow ones, so that you don't have "bleed." Now, go back a little bit, and find the entry on dragon's tongue beans. Make that one too. And if you don't have dragon tongues, use any green bean you have.

Sounds like a lot of work , doesn't it? It really isn't. Go through them all. You'll see what I mean.

Now, what quantity of each vegetable? Per person, I would say two medium, or three small beets, either quartered or halved, depending on the size of the beet. And about 1/3 of a pound of beans. When they're done, and cool, cut them into bite sized pieces. Finally, a pound of potatoes. I used fingerlings, which I almost never do, but they worked fine. A note on them, though. Fingerlings are the freshest of potatoes, even fresher than "new" potatoes, which aren't new. So if you have fingerlings, refrigerate them. Or else, you will find that some of your taties have gone bad and gotten very soft, and very smelly, and there is little that smells worse than a rotten potato. Cook them in boiling salt water, until they are just firm. It will probably take about fifteen minutes, and if you are so inclined, as I was, when they are cool, slice them lengthwise.

Now you have all your ingredients. I tossed all the vegetable components together, and then crumbled a pound of tuna confit over the top of it.

The key element to this dish, I think, is the dressing, and it's somewhat of an unusual one for Annalena. It's very sharp. And it has no vinegar; rather, it is the juice of one very large lemon (about 1/4 cup), and two tablespoons of dijon mustard, with a pinch of salt, and half a cup of olive oil, all of this shaken up.

This is a much more tart, much more stinging dressing than you will usually find, but it's really necessary for these ingredients. Pour it all over the salad, give it a light toss, and know what... you have a great fairly light Sunday dinner.

The Guyman and I positively devoured this. I thought there would be some left over today for the legendary French "Pan bagnat" sandwich, but alas, I had to make do with simple cheddar cheese on sun dried tomato bread. C'est la vie.