Salad Piemontaise

Sydney weather gave us but a brief glimpse of the weather we should be having over the weekend.  It was enough of a tempter to make you fire up the barbie and head outside.  What are you to add to the old grilled meat that is a little bit different?  There are all your usual suspects - coleslaw, green salad, potato salad.....

I was reading the new Good Food magazine and there was a section called Off Duty Chefs.  The article  gave recipes from Manu Feildel and Miguel Maestre.  Now if you can't personally invite these guys to dinner - and who wouldn't love to have that lovely sexy sounding frenchman Manu at the dinner table with you (I just love his accent!!)?  Do the next best thing - make his recipe!

The names of his dishes even sound sexy - Salad Piemontaise (Potato Salad!!) - but saying that is does have a few unusual ingredients that you may not have added to your potato salad before!!

Salad Piemontaise

1kg kipfler potatoes, scrubbed
3 large, firm tomatoes, seeded (oops!), cut into 1cm cubes
200g piece ham, chopped
50g cornichons (picked baby cucumbers) chopped
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, chopped
4 hard boiled eggs, quartered

Mayonnaise Dressing *


1 cup good quality whole egg mayonnaise (I used the one that I had made with the thermomix)
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp red wine vinegar
freshly ground black pepper

Cook the potatoes in salted simmering water on medium heat for 15-20 minutes, until just tender, but not soft.  Drain and rinse under cold water.  When cool enough to handle peel the potatoes and cut into large cubes (I did disks as all the potatoes were roughly the same size).

Meanwhile combine all the dressing ingredients.  Season to taste.

Combine the tomato, ham, cornichon, parsley and potato.  Pour over the dressing, and combine.  Add the eggs, then toss gently again.

This was a really yummy potato salad - believe me I am still munching on the leftovers!!!  It is great all by itself too as there are so many flavours in there!!

* The actual recipe in the magazine gave you the ingredients to make the mayo from scratch - but as I already had some I didn't do it this way!.

Here is a photo of the "recycled" Prawn Patty Noodle Salad - it was pretty good too!!

So Dear Reader do you just have to crank up the BBQ too as soon as the warm weather comes to town???