Niçoise Salad with Salmon and Roast Potatoes

This is a magical salad that works well for both lunches and dinners. It's also an incredible dinner party dish to serve, especially during the summer when you want something bright and fresh while also being filling enough. This recipe serves 2, but it easily scales for a much bigger group. While nicoise salad is typically served with seared tuna, I like to use a simple roast salmon. If you're vegetarian, you could skip the salmon all together and it's still incredibly tasty. This recipe is also gluten and dairy free.

Traditional nicoise also uses boiled potatoes, which I find to be bland and boring - instead I roast halved baby potatoes until super crispy, and they cook at the same temperature as the fish making them easy to roast at the same time (you'll start the potatoes first and add the salmon to the oven for the last 10 minutes).

The other thing I love about this salad is it can all be served cold - so it's the perfect dish to prep all the ingredients ahead and plate whenever you're ready to eat. Literally every part of the salad can be prepped ahead (soft boiling eggs, blanching green beens, roasting salmon, roasting potatoes, chopping tomatoes and olives, and margin the vinaigrette). Each part of the salad can be stored in the fridge for a few days, so if you like it on night one it's great for leftover lunches later during the week!

When I boil the eggs (7 minutes for a perfectly jammy center), I tend to boil more than I need for the salad and use the jammy boiled eggs for a snack or quick breakfast or lunch later in the week. As long as all the eggs are submerged in the boiling water, you can cook as many of them as you like at once.

The vinaigrette for this salad is one of my favorites - a bright and acidic dijon vinaigrette. It's so good with the fish and all the other parts of the salad. The vinaigrette keeps for a week in the fridge, so if you have extra left over you can use it on pretty much anything!