A Nice + Easy Niçoise
a great lunch for a group with various likes + dislikes
Hi! If you’re new here, on Tuesdays I devote my newsletter to “I Love Lunch” and include an easy lunch recipe for paid subscribers. To me, lunch recipes are especially simple to make and simple to clean-up. Of course you can make the recipe for any mealtime that you’d like! I always include a number of helpful notes for paid subscribers (i.e. ways to make vegetarian/vegan/gluten-free versions of the recipe and other fun notes/ideas).
I’ve been focusing a lot of these Tuesday “I Love Lunch” recipes on what I think of as weekday recipes — the kind-of meals that get us through our day-to-day lives. Stuff that can not only be made quickly and easily, but also eaten quickly and easily.
Today I want to talk about something that is still very easy and fairly quick to make, but encourages a bit more of a lingering lunchtime. Perhaps a weekend lunch. Perhaps a take-more-than-10-minutes-to-eat-on-a-workday lunch.
Enter: A Nice + Easy Niçoise, an excellent lunch for everyone, but especially for a group with various likes + dislikes.
We interrupt regular programming for a quick announcement…
Okay, back to Niçoise!
People have strong opinions on what belongs in a Niçoise (especially folks from Nice). While I love people with strong opinions, when it comes to making lunch at my house, I value using what I’ve got on hand over authenticity. For a Niçoise salad, I think having a mix of cooked and raw vegetables, fish of some kind, boiled eggs, olives, and a vinaigrette is perfect. Within those categories, I see a lot of flexibility.
Because there’s such a nice mix of simple stuff, if you keep it all separate, it becomes an ideal meal for a group of people with various preferences. Sure you can make composed plates for everyone, but here’s what a build-your-own Niçoise salad situation looked like in my kitchen when I recently served it for a family lunch:
Here’s what I included from top to bottom:
Bread + room temperature butter
A big bowl of torn lettuce + radicchio
Hard boiled eggs (if you serve them in their shells then everyone gets to be interactive a.k.a. you don’t have to peel them all yourself)
Green olives (for a classic Niçoise you’d use Niçoise olives)
Halved grape tomatoes
Boiled haricots verts (served at room temperature)
Boiled tiny potatoes (served at room temperature)
Mustardy Vinaigrette* (*recipe below for paid subscribers)
Smoked Fish Salad* (more on this below! / *recipe below for paid subscribers)
And a random side of mac-and-cheese (because my niece was at this lunch and she loves it and I love her!)
And a few notes about how to prepare everything with very little stress + fuss:
As I mentioned above, let everyone peel their own eggs — not only does this mean less work for you and “fun” for them — it also means you can make your eggs up to a few days in advance, let them cool, and store them in the fridge with minimal odor (peeled hard boiled eggs smell a lot worse than unpeeled ones)
The eggs, potatoes, and green beans can all be cooked in their own batches in the same pot so you only dirty one pot — especially since they can all be served at room temperature and don’t need to be piping hot
The vinaigrette and the fish salad can also be made up to a few days ahead and stored covered in the fridge — bring both to room temperature before serving
Here’s the best way to halve grape tomatoes (swipe right in the post for the video!)
Serving the lettuce component undressed not only means everyone can add dressing as they please, it also means any leftovers won’t go to waste since they won’t get wilted and soggy!
Okay, more about that fish salad….
For the fish component of a Niçoise salad, you can use canned or jarred anchovies or tuna, fresh tuna…or whatever you want. For a delicious Smoked Fish Salad, I combined two very trendy ingredients that I will admit are absolutely delicious:
Fishwife Smoked Rainbow Trout (not sponsored! I buy their fish regularly!)
Ayoh! Tangy Dijonayo (one of Molly Baz’s ‘sando sauces’ — I got a press package with one of each and while there was no ask or pressure whatsoever to share anything, I will always tell you when I got something for free and this is absolutely something I’d pay for — it’s delicious and includes all of the things I’d put in a fish salad like this: mayo, Dijon, chopped cornichons, and mustard seeds)
I ended up doing one can of the Fishwife trout and a can of plain tuna because the smoked trout is HEAVY on flavor, plus some of the Dijonayo, freshly chopped dill and thinly sliced scallions. Exact amounts and more notes below in the recipe for paid subscribers!
Most of A Nice + Easy Niçoise does not require a recipe (boil potatoes until they’re soft, cut some tomatoes in half, etc.). But for the two things that do benefit from measurements/instructions, paid subscribers will find the following two recipes below the paywall:
Mustardy Vinaigrette
Smoked Fish Salad
Both recipes are also available in a single PDF for paid subscribers along with notes if you are:
Vegetarian?
Vegan?
Prefer sandwiches?
Mustardy Vinaigrette
Makes about a cup
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Keep Calm & Cook On to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.