Very green salad

I have been looking into French vegetarian cuisine, because this year lucky me is spending Easter in Paris! Vegetarian meals are not so typical in traditional French cooking, but I'm determined to find the best influences and ideas. I have never been to Paris, and now I want to visit several vegetable markets, and hopefully will be able to find nice vegetarian cafés and restaurants. Any recommendations? I'm definitely going to post some exciting bits from my trip here afterwards, but now to today's recipe.

I recently purchased the wonderful vegetarian French Market Cookbook by Clotilde Dusoulier, where I found this recipe for the Very green salad – Salade toute verte (p.18-19). I was impressed by the freshness of the recipes in this book, and particularly in this one the flavours were nicely balanced. Have also a look at Clotilde's blog here, it's not a vegetarian blog, but many dishes are plant based. 

Here is my take on this filling warm and cold spring salad.

For the salad:

500g new potatoes + a sprinkle of salt and vegetable oil for roasting the potatoes

200g asparagus

1 cup of frozen peas

1 large heart of romaine lettuce

½ cup hazelnuts

For the dressing:

Some fresh coriander leaves

1tbsp lemon juice

1tbsp grapeseed oil

1tbsp hazelnut oil

1tsp sea salt

½tsp ground black pepper

Method:

Wash the potatoes, place them in a roasting dish, brush with vegetable oil and sprinkle with sea salt. Roast them at 180C for about 40 minutes until cooked. Toss them a few times during the roasting.

Toast the halved hazelnuts. Put then in an oven dish and bake at 180C for about 10 minutes. Steam the asparagus and peas until tender.

Cut the lettuce and prepare the dressing by just mixing the ingredients together. Add the dressing to the lettuce just before the warm components are done. I decided to serve the peas and asparagus also warm, just like the potatoes.

Then mix all the ingredients together and serve instantly. Bon appétit!

Your VegHog