Oui, s’il vous plaît!
Summer weather means spending time outdoors, not in the kitchen. When we’re planning our meals on warmer days, we look for recipes that require little use of the oven and have a quick prep time. Salads are the perfect solution.
One of our favorite recipes to make this time of year is our plant-based Salade Niçoise. We have adapted this recipe from the classic French version; ours does not include the fish or egg, but it still has all the flavor! There is very little cooking required– you just need to steam some vegetables for a few minutes and let them cool (or prep them ahead of time). For this recipe, you will need:
- Mix of spring greens
- Cucumber
- Steamed green beans (or haricots verts, if you wanna be fancy)
- Steamed white potatoes (red or yellow varieties with thin skins taste best in this dish)
- Kalamata olives (black are good, too)
- One can of cannellini beans
- Cherry or grape tomatoes
- Additionally, you can add a few special ingredients like radishes, hearts of palm, shredded carrots or artichoke hearts
We don’t follow a hard and fast recipe for this dish- we just make enough to feed the two of us. To dress this salad, we whip up a super simple oil-free dressing consisting of grainy Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, a few cloves of chopped garlic, and some salt and pepper. We haven’t bought salad dressing in years and prefer to make our own. This link will provide you with a few more oil-free examples that are easy to make on the fly!
This really is a tried and true recipe for us, as we will often make it once a week during the summertime. We used to eat this dish when we still ate meat and when we switched to a plant-based diet, we knew we wanted to keep this one in our repertoire. The next time you’re feeling like dishing up some French cuisine, try it sans poisson!