Friday, February 24, 2012

Tuna Salad of a Different Variety

Isn't it cute how the tuna steak looks like a heart?
So with Lent comes meatless Fridays.  We have a heap of meatless recipes that we love, ranging from lemon basil salmon to beer battered tilapia to tofu stir fry ... but for some reason all we think about on Fridays is the best place in town to get Fish n Chips .. sure we can make our own .. but it's time consuming, imperfect and semi-unpredictable .. and a lot of oil-waste! ... this week Ryan offered to take us all out to Fiddler's Hearth for thee best fish n chips .. all wrapped up in newspaper ... but considering it's the first Friday of Lent ... I'm sure that place is a zoo ..!!

So .. instead .. we attempted to recreate another meatless fishy restaurant favorite - the Nicoise Salad from Uptown Kitchen!  I ran to the grocery this afternoon picking up various produce items for our salad, including a  mixed pack of 3 types of lettuces grown on family farms, all organic and beautiful .. conveniently on sale .. Yumm!  It reminded me of the lettuces we grew in our garden 2 summers ago .. I also grabbed cherry tomatoes, Kalmata olives, and Annie's Green Garlic salad dressing - the closest comparison I could find to the tart, lemony dressing they serve at Uptown ..


Come time to shop for Tuna I was a little price conscious ... the Sashimi grade tuna steaks were  nearly $12 / pound and gigantic .. way out of our price range, as well as our eating capacity .. so I went the frozen route, finding an organic, wild-caught, renewable-fishing-friendly variety that was on sale (Huzzah! Thank you Lent! Hahah) ..!  The tuna that comes atop the Nicoise salad is that gorgeous seared ahi tuna - beautifully crisp on the outside and bright pink in the middle?  The sadness that came alongside our frozen tuna - no pink middle =(  That was o.k. though ... we survived the visual let down ;-)  After reviewing a few recipes I found online, we decided to dust our tuna with ... Montreal Steak of all things!! Hahah - it was very good - the lemon-salty-peppery-ness of it wen well to the salad.

All-in-all, our salads were fabulous .. and despite the hard boiled egg (my least favorite part), we would definitely revisit this recipe!  Ryan was awesome enough to whip up some homemade french bread for us.  It will last the weekend and lend itself nicely toward other recipes we have in mind for the week - Dinner of the Month (Italian-something yumm - you can see the dipping oil we got this month in our picture - it was delicious with a little bit of salt added), Spaghetti Pie, Oo and we've both been craving Chicken Parmesan ;-)


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