Shredded Carrot and Walnut Salad Recipe

Delicious food doesn't have to be complicated. Today I made carottes rapées, which is a staple in French cuisine and requires almost no complicated preparation. This version isn't completely authentic because of a few enhancements I made. Specifically, once the carrots were "rapées" (shredded), I added freshly shredded Parmesan cheese, a few capers, fresh dill and sesame caramelized walnuts. 

There's a saying in French: "Mange des carottes, ça rend aimable!", which translates to "eat carrots, they will make you become more kind". The saying owes its origin to the donkey, which has a reputation for being very stubborn. Carrots were used as, well, a carrot, to make the donkey move faster. So if you’re kids or your significant other are giving you a hard time, try feeding them carrots. It works for me! 

Tuna Nicoise Salad with Goose Eggs

Today, I made a French salad recipe called nicoise salad. I filled the salad with a combination of salad greens, capers, tuna and goose eggs. I was testing the recipe because school is about to start, and I'm not a big fan of the ready-made all-inclusive food trays. They don't contain much except a few crackers and small pieces of cheese and cold meat that are usually packed with salt, sugar and fat.

The salad received two thumbs up from my little munchkin. She loves hard-cooked eggs, which makes folding in the other ingredients much easier. As an added bonus, hard-boiled eggs are easy to pack. If you're planning on making this for your kids, the nicoise salad dressing can be packed separately so the salad is still crunchy and fresh when lunch time finally arrives.

A Pham Fatale reader named Karen left a wonderfully insightful comment last week where she described the challenges of preparing lunches for her kids. While my little munchkin hasn't experienced the teasing from her classmates (yet) even though her lunch box is different from her friends, I understand the issue. It has inspired me to come up with back-to-school recipes that covertly sneak nutritious ingredients into dishes that are familiar to kids. What could be more femme fatale worthy than that?

Olive Tapenade Chicken Rolls

Olive tapenade is extremely versatile and can be used as a spread or filling in many different dishes. You can also use it in place of more traditional party dips such as hummus, guacamole, salsa or roasted bell pepper spread. In this recipe, I added goat cheese to the tapenade and used the mixture as a filling for chicken rolls. I served the dish with a mildly sweet carrot purée that makes an excellent foil to the savory flavor of the tapenade.

If it's not part of your culinary repertoire yet, you should definitely learn to prepare tapenade. It will open up a whole new world of easy to prepare, delectable dishes.