Sardines, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Egg, String Beans and Lettuce

Lia’s Sardine Nicoise

  • Lia’s Sardine Nicoise
  • Lia’s Sardine Nicoise
  • Lia’s Sardine Nicoise
  • Lia’s Sardine Nicoise
  • Lia’s Sardine Nicoise

NOTES

This is a salad best served as a main course. It’s great for brunch or parties, since the colors are so vibrant. Would be good to pack and take to work on a picnic, if you omit the lettuce.

INSTRUCTIONS

Wash and spin lettuce, tear into bite-sized pieces. Add to a large bowl.

Boil eggs for 5 minutes, remove from heat, reserve boiling water  and run eggs under cold water. Peel and cut into quarters.

Boil your potatoes in the same boiling water until they are soft enough that you can easily stick a  for through them, about 10 minutes. Cut potatoes into quarters lengthwise.

Quarter tomatoes, but ends of string beans and cut carrots into 2″ long matchstick pieces.  They should be the same width and as string beans.

In a small dish, add mustard and  lemon juice and mix well. Add olive oil in a slow stream and whisk until emulsified. Add Caperberries, sliced as thinly as possible.

Dress your greens lightly, add string beans, tomatoes and carrots and one extra tbs of dressing. toss gently to combine. Add potatoes, eggs and sardines at the end on top.

Top with cracked black pepper and sea salt, and drizzle some of the oil rom the can of sardines on top.

Serve with some crusty toasted bread.

RECIPE

DIFFICULTY

EASY

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SERVES

4

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PREP TIME

15 MINS

salad

  • 1 
    head 
    red leaf letuce
  • 1 
    cup 
    heirloom cherry tomatoes
  • 1 
     
    carrot, peeled
  • 1 
    handful 
    heirloom baby potatoes
  • 3 
     
    large organic eggs, hardboiled and peeled

Dressing

  • 1 1/2 
    tsp 
    dijon mustard
  • 3 
     
    caperberries, thinly sliced
  • 1 
    lemon 
    juiced
  • 1/4 
    cup 
    olive oil
  •  
     
    Salt and pepper to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

Wash and spin lettuce, tear into bite-sized pieces. Add to a large bowl.

Boil eggs for 5 minutes, remove from heat, reserve boiling water  and run eggs under cold water. Peel and cut into quarters.

Boil your potatoes in the same boiling water until they are soft enough that you can easily stick a  for through them, about 10 minutes. Cut potatoes into quarters lengthwise.

Quarter tomatoes, but ends of string beans and cut carrots into 2″ long matchstick pieces.  They should be the same width and as string beans.

In a small dish, add mustard and  lemon juice and mix well. Add olive oil in a slow stream and whisk until emulsified. Add Caperberries, sliced as thinly as possible.

Dress your greens lightly, add string beans, tomatoes and carrots and one extra tbs of dressing. toss gently to combine. Add potatoes, eggs and sardines at the end on top.

Top with cracked black pepper and sea salt, and drizzle some of the oil rom the can of sardines on top.

Serve with some crusty toasted bread.

Meet Lia Cinquegrano, the brains and design talent behind Thomas IV, her very own handbag company made in Brooklyn. When Lia isn’t working full time at her day job she is running her bag line, when she is not running her bag line she is working on her blog Phuck Fashion.  When she is not blogging, she is cooking. She is a busy lady, so I was honored to have her as a guest-blogger on a cold and snowy Sunday afternoon. 

Lia and I were college roommates at Rhode Island School of Design, and I must say, my love of cooking definitely incubated in this period of our co-habitation. We actually had our own cooking TV show, Dirty Dishes, for which we recreated Thomas Jefferson’s Montecello out of gingerbread, and made our own vacu-formed molds to build an Egyptian landscape out of jello. Ok, so that was more bastardized history than fine cookery, per se, but we spent a lot of time in the kitchen. 

We didn’t always get it right, and we certainly relied on a George Foreman Grill at times, but we were leaps and bounds ahead of your average college students (at the time I dated a guy who only ate canned black olives and freezer pops).

Lia is as inventive in the kitchen as she is in the studio. For SaladForPresident, she interpreted the classic Nicoise, but we substituted sardines for the tuna (more sustainable, lower in mercury and much cheaper), she mixed up the colors of the potatoes, kept her  string beans raw, and tossed in caper berries instead of olives. The result was a satisfying and flavorful lunch that added a lot of color to a dreary day. Maybe less a Nicoise, and more a Cinquegrano special ultimately, but no complaints on this end.