If you are looking for a great summer side dish to serve with just about anything, I highly recommend you try this recipe. My wife’s sister served this salad to us over the weekend twice. Once with steak and the next night with grilled salmon. It was even better the second night.

She used Patricia Wells’ wonderful cookbook, At Home In Provence, (a cookbook I now need to go and buy) but made a few changes of her own including substituting tomatoes and adding small pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese.

Tomato, Mozzarella & Green Bean Salad
Adapted by Aunt Judy from Patricia Wells’ At Home In Provence
Makes about 8 servings

Ingredients

Dressing

• 1-tablespoon sherry wine vinegar (good quality)
• Salt, to taste
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 shallots, minced

Salad

• ½ pound baby heirloom tomatoes instead of 1 firm medium sized tomato
• sea salt
• 1 pound tender green beans
• 1 egg of fresh mozzarella cheese, cut into bite sized pieces
• 4 tablespoons fresh cilantro (coriander)

Prepare the Dressing

Whisk together the vinegar and salt in a small bowl. Add the shallots and combine. Slowly drizzle in the oil while whisking vigorously to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt.

Tomatoes – my sister-in-law used delicious, sweet tiny heirloom tomatoes. If you use a regular tomato, you’ll need to core, seed, chop it. Patricia Wells says to peel the tomato too, but I’m not sure I would add that extra step to the process. Your choice.

Prepare the Tomatoes

If using a regular tomato, you want to drain all the liquid out of the tomatoes so place the cut up pieces into a fine-mesh sieve or colander and sprinkle with a little salt. Set them over a bowl to drain. Judy used the small but sweet grape tomatoes so she ignored this step and the salad was fine.

Blanch the Green Beans

Bring a large pot of water to boil. While the water is coming to a boil, wash and trim the ends of the beans. Then cut up the beans into 1-inch lengths. Don’t forget to get the ice-cold water bath ready to quickly stop the cooking process after the beans are blanched. Just fill up another bowl with water and ice.

As soon as the water comes to a boil, add a couple of teaspoons of salt and then the beans. Bring back to a boil and cook until the beans are “crisp-tender”. This should take about 5 minutes. Quickly drain the beans and place them into the ice cold water bath for a couple of minutes. Drain and dry them with a kitchen towel.

Dress the Salad

Put the beans in a serving bowl, add the oil and vinegar dressing and stir everything together. Now’s good time to taste and adjust seasoning. Add the drained tomatoes, mozzarella, and cilantro and toss until well mixed.

Serve it up individually or family style in a big bowl.

101 Ways to Make Chicken Salad

Making chicken salad on a hot summer night couldn’t be easier, especially if you have leftover roasted chicken from the night before. Whether you roast the chicken yourself or buy a rotisserie chicken at your local market, one of the best ways to use up leftovers is cut it up to pieces and make chicken salad.

There must be 101 ways to make chicken salad depending on what you have on hand to toss into it. I’m sure everyone has a favorite recipe from his or her mom or great aunt but in our house, we usually go with what’s on hand or in the refrigerator and get creative.

Basically, chicken salad is chicken, chopped up vegetables; some sort of fruit and a dressing that typically has mayonnaise associated with it. A classic chicken salad could be just chicken, celery, mayo and salt & pepper. That’s it. That simple.

Instead of giving you exact recipe with measured out ingredients, I’d wanted to give you some ideas as to what you can try in your own recipe. I’m not giving you measurements because I never make the same chicken salad twice and really don’t have them. I suppose if you come up with the most amazing homemade chicken salad recipe ever, you may want to write it down so you can make it again some time.

This list is by no means exhausted but it’s a good start. I encourage you to experiment with all your favorite ingredients and if you come up with something special, add it to the comments below.

A Few Simple Suggestions

• Don’t add too many additional ingredients. – Sometimes less is more. You want to combine various ingredients that work well together but don’t completely overpower the flavor of the chicken. They are there to add flavor, color and texture but if you put too many of them together, it will really confuse your taste buds.

• Prepare all the non-dressing ingredients together separately from the dressing ingredients. – You want the chicken, vegetables and fruit to be balanced just like you want the dressing to be balanced. If you are simply using mayonnaise, the task is easy, but if you start adding other ingredients to the mayo, it gets a little trickier.

• Don’t add all the dressing to the chicken mixture at one time. You don’t want to overpower the chicken with dressing. It is easier to add more than try to remove excess dressing and remember nothing is worse than an over dressed salad.
  Customize the mayonnaise by adding ingredients that you like and will work with the rest of the ingredients.

• Check for seasonings at the end especially salt and pepper

• Chicken salad makes great sandwiches, you can also serve it with a salad or on a bed of lettuce. – The art of making a great chicken salad sandwich has as much to do with the type of bread you are serving it on, but that’s a subject for another blog. Since my wife isn’t eating bread these days, we typically serve it with a salad. I eat the leftovers on bread the next day if there is any left.

Classic Chicken Salad Ingredient Suggestions besides the Chicken and Mayonnaise

• Celery
• Onion
• Carrot
• Peppers
• Seedless grapes

Alternative Ingredients

• Toasted almond slivers
• Capers – drained
• Chopped sweet pickles or pickle relish
• Water chestnuts
• Hard-boiled eggs, chopped
• Nuts – walnuts, pecans, cashews, pine nuts, sesame seeds
• Fruits- apple slices, pear, raisins, cranberries, craisins, tomato, avocado, olives, mandarin oranges, cherries
• Vegetables – asparagus, cucumber,
• Cheese – hard cheese, grated or thin slices of soft cheese

Mayonnaise Additions

• Herbs – basil, parsley, tarragon, chervil, chives, sage, mint
• Spices – ginger, dry mustard, honey mustard, paprika, oregano
• Chutney
• Jam or preserves
• Honey
• Citrus juice – lemon, orange, grapefruit
• Peanut butter
• Vinegar
• Soy Sauce
• Hot Sauce
• Maple syrup
• Yogurt

What Are Your Favorite Ingredient Combinations

Let me know how you like your chicken salad in the comments section below.

“The act of cooking ends in creativity but begins in the hands.” - Chef Robert Reynolds

I just posted a new Novice to Pro interview with Chef Robert Reynolds, cookbook author, cooking teacher, restauranteur and a heck of a nice guy. I called Chef Reynolds today in Portland, Oregon and we talked about food, cooking, France and and his culinary school, Chefs Studio.

Chef Reynolds trained in France with Madeleine Kamman and was mentored with Josephine Araldo. The two of them co-authored the cookbook, From a Breton Garden. He owned the very popular restaurant in San Francisco, Le Trou, from 1982 to 1996.

Check out my interview with Chef Reynolds to hear his suggestions to help novice cooks get over their fear of cooking or his most important elements when creating a recipe from scratch. Below is his recipe for Three Salads. They are from his cookbook, An Excuse To Be Together.

THREE SALADS

Arrange all three salads nicely on a plate. Garnish them with butter lettuce and hard cooked eggs for lunch. You might sense what it is like to grow up with a French Maman who often makes dishes like these. Don’t forget the baguette!

Carrot Salad

(Note: I refer to flavorless oil to imply oils (peanut, sunflower, safflower, etc.) that don’t have as pronounced a flavor as olive oil.)

Ingredients

• 6 medium-sized new carrots
• Sea salt to taste
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 1 or 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard, to taste
• 4 tablespoons flavorless oil (see Note above)
• 1 tablespoon chopped parsley
• Freshly ground pepper

Grate 2 cups of new carrots through the fine holes of a box grater. Put a generous pinch of sea salt into a small bowl. Add 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar, swirling to dissolve the salt. Add Dijon mustard to taste and using a fork, whisk to incorporate 4 tablespoons of oil. Toss the carrots with chopped parsley. Finish with salt and pepper to taste.

Beet Salad

Roast 2 to 3 whole, medium-sized beets at 350 degrees F until they become fork tender, about an hour. When they have cooled, peel them. Dice or shred and put into a bowl before tossing with another vinaigrette.

Celery Root Salad

Ingredients

• 1 head of celery root, about 1 pound
• Juice of half a lemon
• Sea salt to taste
• 1 egg yolk
• 3/4 cup flavorless oil (See note above in carrot salad)
• 1 tablespoon finely-chopped chives

Quarter the celery root, peel, then grate through the large holes of a box grater. Bring water to a boil, add half a tablespoon of salt and blanch the celery root for 1 minute. Drain and squeeze gently to dry thoroughly. Leave in a bowl to cool.

Prepare a mayonnaise in a food processor with the juice of half a lemon, a teaspoon of sea salt and one egg yolk. Turn the machine on and slowly pour in 3/4 cup of flavorless oil in a steady stream.  When half the oil has been added, taste for seasoning. (If the sauce needs more salt, dilute a pinch in a tablespoon of boiling water. The heat helps set the egg and loosens the texture of the mayonnaise.) With the machine running, add the remaining oil in a thin stream to finish the mayonnaise.

Toss the blanched celery root with the mayonnaise. Decorate the salad with a tablespoon of finely chopped chives.

NOTE: My friend Bart Evans reminded me that a classic Sauce Remoulade for celery root can be achieved by adding a teaspoon each of chopped capers and cornichons along with chives and cayenne to our mayonnaise.