Salade Nicoise

My cat is a fancy cat.  He has one paw that he holds just so, as if sipping tea or posing for a very important portrait.  He's been known to wear a bow tie.  He doesn't like to get his paws dirty, and he very much enjoys his bed piled high with blankets.

This is a fancy salad.  It's the kind of salad you might serve if you had someone to impress, or if you just felt like turning your kitchen into a French cafe.  This salad paints in bold colors.  It is somehow light and fully satisfying at the same time.  I don't often crave a salad for dinner.  But when I do, it's this one.

A true Nicoise is nothing more than potatoes, green beans, and anchovies.  However, the modern version is piled high with tuna, dotted with boiled eggs, and tossed with any number of vegetables.  Every restaurant in France might serve a different salade Nicoise, but this is the one I serve.

It's fancy enough for cats of even the most discerning tastes.

Salade Nicoise
Serves 2

1 lb green beans, trimmed
2 lbs new potatoes
2 sweet peppers, thinly sliced
2 cans tuna
salt and pepper
olive oil
basil vinaigrette
4 hard-cooked eggs, quartered

Boil the green beans in salted water for five minutes.  Drain and cool.

Boil the potatoes in salted water for 15 minutes, or until fork tender.  Drain, cool, and halve.

Season tuna with salt and pepper.  Drizzle with olive oil and toss.

Season green beans with salt and pepper, and dress with basil vinaigrette.  Toss green beans with peppers.  Pile onto two plates.  Pile tuna in the middle of each salad, and surround the plate with eggs and potatoes.  Drizzle everything with basil vinaigrette, and season with salt and pepper.

Basil Vinaigrette

2 shallots, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, smashed
3 T red wine vinegar
salt and pepper
small handful basil leaves
1 1/2 c olive oil

Put shallots and garlic in a bowl with the vinegar.  Add salt and pepper.  Crush basil leaves and add to bowl.  Let sit for 10 to 15 minutes.

Whisk olive oil into vinegar mixture.  Taste and adjust seasoning.  The vinaigrette is enough for a salade Nicoise and lots left over for your next salad.

Chicken Stock, Or, How to Use a Chicken: Part III

Waste not, want not.  We've heard it before.  But how many of us scrape our plates into the trash after dinner?  How often do we discover some sad leftovers in the back of the fridge and decide they're better off going out than being eaten?  Do we see the cores, the skins, the crusts, the bones, the leaves, the stalks as inedible pieces of food we must dispose to get at the good stuff?

The thing is, often the "good stuff" is really in the parts we don't want, if we're talking about the most nutritional bang for your buck.  Bones, especially, contain nutrients that we might not find anywhere else in our diets.  Collagen, gelatin, glucosamine.  You're taking something that you would have otherwise thrown in the trash and extracting nutritional gold.  How could it get better than that?

I'll admit that I usually don't make my own stocks.  The simple reason is that I don't eat a lot of meat.  We seldom have bones around.  But with my wife's iron levels needing a little help, we've incorporated more flesh into our diets.  And when you're done picking over that delicious roast chicken, when you're through turning into into all the meals you can get out of it, you'll have a carcass perfect for making stock.

You'll feel thrifty.  You'll feel accomplished.  And you'll have several quarts of stock in your fridge, just waiting to be turned into soups and stews, waiting to be used in curries and rice dishes, and just about anything else you can dream up.

Chicken Stock
Makes 4-6 quarts

chicken bones
apple cider vinegar
celery
onion
carrots
salt and pepper
water

There's pretty much no recipe here.  Put all your bones in a slow cooker.  Drizzle some apple cider vinegar over them, about a tablespoon or two.  Wait a few minutes.  Add whatever vegetables you want, chopped up into reasonable pieces.  I throw in my onion skins; they'll help get that rich golden color.  Salt and pepper everything, and cover with water.  Heat on low for up to 24 hours, adding more water if needed.  You can also do this in a regular stock pot, but be sure to keep a closer eye on it.

Blueberry Chicken Salad, Or, How to Use a Chicken: Part II

So you roasted your chicken.  You reveled in the crisp and salty skin, the tender meat.  You ate until you could not eat anymore.  And now you still have a pound of chicken.  What's next?

In the spirit of summer - because, let's be honest, a roast chicken is not exactly summer fare - I encourage you to add blueberries.  And some lemon.  Stir it up with yogurt.  And you've got a good thing going.

We might be buying books and pencils, filling our backpacks with school supplies instead of hiking supplies, and watching the sunset creep earlier and earlier into our evening.  But there's still plenty of summer to be squeezed out of the next month.  We can go swimming after work, and we can do our homework while sunbathing.  We put off soups and stews for a while and opt for fruit that's still ripening, corn shucked just minutes earlier, and salads that are all about summer flavors.  We'll settle into the winter soon enough, so let's throw caution to the wind and some blueberries in our chicken.

Blueberry Chicken Salad
Makes about 4 cups

2 c chicken breast meat, cooked and chopped
4 ribs celery, chopped
1 c blueberries
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 c mayo
1/4 c plain yogurt
salt

Mix everything together in a bowl, seasoning with salt to taste.  Serve in a sandwich or on top of some greens for a delicious salad.