Niçoise to see you

I love a salad, me. Not a limp lettuce and half a tomato, undressed, mind you. A proper wild, rumbuctious, surprise amalgam of ingredients thrown together at apparent random. But I’ve just not been feeling it this year. Maybe in a world of uncertainty there’s no culinary spontaneity left in me. Or maybe that it’s a practical issue: I’ve just not been picking up odd ingredients on the way through places and then having to find a use for them.

Either way, Summer Redux and a better-than-average fridge haul has inspired me a little, though not with entire success.

Green beans? Cold potatoes? Eggs? Tomatoes (home grown)? Tick.

Tuna? No, on ecological grounds. ‘But that’s OK’, I thought, ‘we’ll just up the olives’.

Aha.

You know those ingredients you Always Have In, right up until the point when you suddenly don’t? Round here it’s dry black olives.

So it’s salad Niçoise-ique, with capers in place of all the other salty things. I’d always thought it was supposed to be tuna and olives, but the internet in certain quarters seems quite set that I Think I’ll Find it’s anchovies instead. And that the beans aren't mandatory. Also, recommendations as to potatoes Y/N, cucumber, peppers, croutons all got a bit bewildering. So I stopped reading and started chopping instead. And here it is. A salad of a sort for a nice warm day.

More on this front to come. Possibly.