Liberate Leftovers: Next Day Beef Salad

This Next Day Beef Salad has a great sense of timing. The Doristas are venturing ever closer to the terminus of the French Friday’s with Dorie project and I can’t help but see it as appropriate to be once again making a recipe so apt at using the odds and ends left lying around the kitchen from previous pursuits Dorie Greenspan’s book itself is genius in how it coaxes the cook to liberate one’s self from the recipe as written.  These types of recipes liberate the leftovers as well.

I first made this salad just over a year ago when Boeuf a la Ficelle was on the menu.  I followed the recipe exactly and it was fantastic. Like my favorite chicken salad recipes it has a little bit of everything, sweet, hot, crunch, etc.  I did not start life as much of an olive fan but as I got older I found I quite like them so their inclusion here also gave new life to the many other ‘day after’ salads I make during the year. (Of course, I think you could mix packing peanuts with mayonnaise and mustard and make them into an exquisite salad , so it may be its just that?

Since that beef salad from a year ago (that did not survive long enough to photograph) I have made many versions using leftover chicken, lamb, even hamburger patties from the previous night’s barbecue.  Certainly this is what Dorie intended with this recipe.  Having it hear near the end seems somewhat metaphorical to the project.  Its as if Dorie is telling us as we finish up go to now go to our refrigerators and clean up after ourselves.  Don’t let any of this good food we made go to waste as it doesn’t have to.

Next Day Beef Salad

To be a part of the the group’s home stretch efforts I felt it appropriate to revisit the original beef salad as written since I wasn’t successful at photographing it the first time. I had hoped to show it off  in the daylight but once again it started to disappear so fast I could not trust there would even be any left for lunch to roll around so here we served it for dinner. .

This Next Day Beef Salad was an assignment for French Friday’s with Dorie, a cooking group working its way through Dorie Greenspan’s culinary tome “Around My French Table”. We generally avoid including the recipes in our posts. However, wherever there has been a significant adaptation by me or where the recipe has already been publicly posted by Ms. Greenspan or her publishers or by hundreds of other bloggers, or it is, in fact, not much of a recipe at all but rather a methode, I will either include it here (adapted) or provide a direct link to it. Please feel free to contact me via the link provided on my page if you need any assistance finding a French Friday with Dorie Recipe. You should buy the book though.

It will change your life as it has mine.