Nicoise Salad

This recipe is based on the Nicoise Salad recipe from Delia's How to Cook Book Two and the one from Ballymaloe Cookery Course.

The 3 how to cook books from Delia are great, but they look the same and trying to remember which one a recipe is from is a pain. I end up looking through up to 3 indexes, depending on how lucky I get. It would have made sense to include an overall index at the back of volume 3, but not so I'm afraid. Sounds like a contender for Eat Your Books.

If you are looking for value for money in a cookbook then the Ballymaloe one is hard to beat. It probably has more recipes than any other book that I have.

Anyway, this combined recipe is delicious. Have made if a few times now. The list of ingredients is long, but don't let that put you off. They are mostly store cupboard items.

This is enough for a good lunch for 2. Serve it with some crusty bread - the picture shows a white roll that I made the same day.

Ingredients:
A few small new or salad potatoes, cooked, no need to peel
A handful of asparagus.
2 Shallots, or 4 spring onions
A good tin of tuna
2 hard boiled eggs
8 Anchovy fillets
A handful of black olives
A tablespoon of capers

For the dressing:
½ tsp of salt
A clove of garlic chopped finely
A teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 tbsp of white wine vinegar
6 tbsp of olive oil

To make the dressing just put all of the ingredients into a screw top jar - an old jam jar is fine - and shake hard until the whole lot combines into a nice creamy dressing.

Cook the asparagus until tender and then chop it into bite sized pieces. Cut the eggs into quarters and the cooked potatoes into slices. Break the tuna up into bite sized chunks.
Now just arrange all of the ingredients in 2 bowls and pour the dressing over the whole lot. It looks nice if you arrange the tips of the asparagus on top of the whole lot, but as you can see from the photo, I didn't think of this until I was eating it! The potatoes don't have to be completely cold and will absorb a bit more of the dressing if they are warm.

Notes about ingredients
I got the asparagus in Aldi for € 1.79. Very nice stuff, and normally very expensive - so this was great.
The tuna I used was a jar of Albacore from Aldi again. They don't seem to stock this all the time and it is a lot better than the tinned stuff.
Get black olives with the stones still in and remove them yourself. It's a bit fiddly, but worth the effort. The best ones I have found are 'Greek style'. These are not immersed in brine, but are salted and a bit wrinkly.