Deconstructed (Lettuce-Free) Nicoise Salad

Green beans and potatoes (and okay, a delicious-looking French cookbook manuscript that is the entire substance of my working life) got me thinking about Nicoise salad.

I'll let the experts tell you how to make one properly -- the tuna should be fresh! the tuna should be canned! the original version never had potatoes! you have to understand its soul! en francais, s'il vous plait! -- but our version was a simple matter of boiling a few things and opening some packages and cans:

• green beans, trimmed and blanched (3-4 minutes in boiling water)
• new potatoes, boiled (10-12 minutes) and quartered
• eggs, hard-boiled and sliced
• grape tomatoes
• mixed olives
• canned tuna chunks
• vinaigrette dressing (oil, vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper)

And I'm at a bit of a loss to explain how this came about, but for the first time since we started with this farm share (almost a full year ago), I wanted to make a salad ... and we didn't have any lettuce! So we present ... the more-Nicoise-less-salad Nicoise salad.

(Perhaps topically, Mark Bittman wrote a love note to plain old lettuce last week -- The Charms of the Loser Lettuces. More evidence we are soulmates: he stir-fries his lettuce, too!)

To accommodate our diverse household's culinary preferences (i.e., not inflict tuna on the virtuous vegetarians), we served the salad in deconstructed form -- each ingredient in its own bowl and everyone assembles their own.