Hello and welcome to the first Bug Bites salad! I got a beautiful bunch of kale, green beans, and a cucumber from the farmer’s market, and I thought it was about time I threw these green goddess together in a crunchy & creative salad.

The first task for this fancy-sounding-but-really-simple salad is to make the dressing. We are going to do this super crazy blasphemous thing where we don’t use any oil- GASP! That’s right. Just good old lemon juice and dijon. This way the dressing packs the punch it needs, but eliminates the unnecessary fat from the oil.

Combine the juice of the lemon and the dijon in a large bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Badabing-badaboom done.

While you assemble the rest of the salad, hard boil two eggs. Simply place them in a small saucepan and cover them with cool water. Set them on the stove to boil. Once the water is boiling, cover the pot, remove from heat, and let stand for 10 minutes. Perfect eggs every time!

Next, chop the kale into small pieces. My biggest pet peeve is having to eat a salad with giant pieces of lettuce in the way. Most of my favorite salads don’t even have lettuce at all, so I try to chop my greens to be at least the same size as my other ingredients.

Toss the kale in the large bowl with the dressing and let it soak. Kale is such a rough and hardy green that it can really benefit from softening in the acidic dressing for a few minutes.

Next stop on the nicoise train is the green beans. Technically, nicoise salad is made with haricots verts which is a fancy french green bean, but any fresh green bean variety will do. Trim the ends and prepare to blanch. Set a pot of water to boil and fill a bowl with ice water.

Drop the green beans in the boiling water for a few minutes. I like my green beans still crunchy so I don’t boil them longer than 3 or 4 minutes.

Drop them in the ice water once they have boiled to your desired texture. This process “shocks” the beans. It stops the cooking process immediately and keeps the bright color brought out during boiling.

Cut the beans into thirds.

Cucumber is an untraditional ingredient for nicoise, but I won’t tattle if you won’t. This is farm to table cooking people, so we can a little wacky crazy. Don’t tell the french because I’m sure they’re very defensive of their salads and don’t like wacky crazy.

With a vegetable peeler or even a paring knife, carefully cut thin ribbons out of the cucumber. Depending on the size of your cuke, you should only need about half of one. Compost the ends and the seeds please!

Lastly, black olives. Nicoise olives are obviously ideal and most traditional, but in this recipe I’m using kalamata. They are similar black and salty olives, so you won’t even know the difference.

Give them a rough chop.

Time to assemble! Wowie Zowie isn’t making salad easy! And this is going to taste so good you won’t even notice that it’s salad…maybe…you probably will. But still. Yum!

Toss all the ingredients except the eggs in with the dressed kale.

Divide between two bowls and serve each with a halved egg. Bon Appetit! (That is by far the most appropriate use of Bon Appetit thus far on Bug Bites. Huzzah for the French!)

 

Nicoise-inspired Kale Salad

Level: easy

Serves: 2

Ingredients: 

1 bunch kale, finely chopped

2 eggs, hardboiled

1/4 lb green beans or haricot verts

1/4 cup nicoise or kalamata olives, roughly chopped

1/2 large cucumber, shaved into ribbons

For the dressing:

Juice of 1 lemon

1 T dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

 

Toss the kale with the dressing and set aside. Boil the green beans for 3-4 minutes and shock in a bowl of ice water. Remove and cut into thirds. Toss beans, cucumber, and olives with the dressed kale. Divide between two bowls and serve each with an egg.

Enjoy!