Tag: salads

A pint plastic deli tub full of Salad Russe a la JM

Recipe: Salad Russe à la J.M.

June 30, 2025

Growing up in New Orleans, my mother and grandmother weren’t typical American meat-and-potato cooks. They were more Creole cooks, making great use of the flavors and ingredients that were plentiful in South Louisiana. One of my favorite things my mom made was a salad called Salad Russe. It’s a great make-ahead salad for hot and humid New Orleans summer evenings.

I never got her recipe, but I managed to recreate it and put my own twist on it. It’s super simple, and you may have all the ingredients already. I use two ingredients from New Orleans that can be found online. If you can’t find the specific ingredients I use, you can get substitutes at your local grocery store.

Cool your veggies before adding the other ingredients

After cooking the vegetables, allow the veggies to cool on a rimmed sheet pan before adding the other ingredients. This is a tip I got in a recipe for a rice dish from America’s Test Kitchen, but I don’t remember which recipe it was. I love how it lets me get back to making the salad more quickly.

I know cooling the veggies on a rimmed sheet pan is an extra thing to wash. I’ve found that adding the mayo to hot veggies changes the texture of the mayo in a way that doesn’t benefit the salad. You can add the salt and pepper while the veggies are still hot, but I find I can mix it in better once it’s in the mixing bowl.

Notes about my ingredients

The ingredients for Salad Russe a la JM: Blue Plate Light Mayonnaise with Olive Oil, a bag of Steam Ready Mixed Vegetables, and a bottle of Zatarain's Creole MustardThe links below go to the manufacturer’s pages for the products. You can order directly from these links, and you can also buy them from Amazon. I’m providing alternate links for those who would prefer not to shop with Amazon.

The mayo and mustard I use are products that I grew up eating in New Orleans. I grew up eating Blue Plate Mayonnaise, and I often drove past their factory when I would drive to work downtown.

You may wonder why I use an olive oil mayonnaise rather than regular mayo. One of my doctors put me on the Mediterranean Diet a few years ago. I got a jar of Blue Plate Light Mayo with Olive Oil to see how it was. It turns out I couldn’t tell the difference between the two mayos, so I’ve switched to buying the olive oil variant. If you prefer a different brand, you can use it, but Blue Plate has a flavor profile that no other mayo has.

I always put Zatarain’s Creole Mustard on my sandwiches growing up, and it’s been a standard condiment in the house since I learned I could buy it online. My mom’s Salad Russe didn’t include mustard, but I added it to this salad to give it a little extra zing. People who have tried my Salad Russe say it makes my already great salad even better. You can substitute Dijon or spicy brown mustard if that’s what you prefer, but it won’t taste the same.

Salad Russe à la J.M.

Ingredients

  • 1 12-ounce bag of frozen steam-in-the-bag mixed vegetables
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 3 tablespoons Blue Plate Light Mayonnaise with Olive Oil
  • 2 teaspoons Zatarain’s Creole Mustard

Preparation

  • Cook the bag of mixed vegetables according to the package directions. If you prefer to cook them on the stovetop instead of in the microwave, that’s fine. I nuke them because it’s quicker and easier to do.
  • Optional, but recommended: Spread the cooked vegetables out on a rimmed baking sheet and allow them to cool, approximately 5-10 minutes. If you don’t do this, let the vegetables cool completely before the next step.
  • Move the cooled mixed vegetables to a medium mixing bowl and add salt and pepper to taste. I don’t have measurements for the salt and pepper because I’ve never found a set amount of salt and pepper that I use.
  • Stir in the mayonnaise, making sure to coat all of the vegetables. If you want a creamier salad, you can add a little more mayonnaise. Just make sure you don’t end up making the salad scream MAYO at you when you taste it. I did that once, and it wasn’t pretty.
  • Stir in the mustard, making sure it’s well distributed across the salad.

You can serve it immediately, but it’s even better if you put it in the refrigerator for an hour or so to let the flavors meld before serving.

If you make it, let me know what you think of it. I think you’ll find it’s a perfect vegetable side all year round, especially when it’s hot and you don’t want to cook.

Do you love salad dressings?

November 2, 2020

Growing up, my mom and grandmother gave me a love of eating good salads, and in the last few years I’ve started changing from buying salad dressings to making my own. Not only do they not have all the preservatives the stuff on the grocers’ shelves have, they’re also pretty easy to make. I cook for just one, li’l old me, so I’m not going to go through huge productions just to have homemade salad dressing.

Some time back I discovered Rachel Cooks when I was looking for a homemade taco seasoning recipe (there’s also a large batch recipe if you find you want to make it less often but enjoy it regularly). Then I discovered her honey mustard vinaigrette dressing and I became hooked on her recipes.

I’ve since subscribed to her email newsletter, and today’s edition was all about her yummy salad dressings. After tweeting a link I decided to share all of the salad dressing recipes I use. They’re not all from Rachel (sorry!), but they’re so good that I bookmarked them so I could find them easily. I put vinaigrettes into Good Season cruets, and right now I have a bottle of their Italian dressing just to use up one of the packets I got when I decided I wanted a second cruet for salad dressings. My creamy dressings are in repurposed salsa jars, which makes me glad I save my old jars after I empty them. (My taco seasoning is in a reused spice bottle that lives next to my nukeomatic.)

My gateway to homemade dressings was the vinaigrette from The Kitchn’s Classic Salad Niçoise. I don’t remember where I saw the recipe, but I quickly bookmarked it as something to try. I’ve since made it for other salads, and if I didn’t have a bottle of Italian dressing in my fridge the bottle would have balsamic vinaigrette from a stand-alone recipe.

I think I found Rachel’s honey mustard vinaigrette recipe while looking for balsamic vinaigrette recipes, and it quickly became my favorite dressing. I use Grey Poupon’s Harvest Coarse Ground Dijon Mustard in it, and I’m thinking of trying it with Zatarain’s Creole Mustard something that I grew up eating on sandwiches. I could easily use just this dressing on all my salads if I didn’t want to make sure I didn’t get sick of eating it all the time.

Every now and then I want some thousand island dressing and wanted to find recipe, but every recipe I found used a hard boiled egg. Adding the egg sharply reduces how long it will last in your fridge, and when I was ready to make it I wanted something that needed less prep work than Rachel’s recipe called for. I ended up going with a recipe from Simply Whisked, but I’ll give Rachel’s recipe a try for the next batch, but my days of buying bottles of thousand island are over.

When I was in high school, Kraft’s Catalina dressing was my go-to dressing. Since I got older I didn’t like how sweet it was, but every now and then I still want some on my salad. Rachel has a recipe for that, and it’s just what the doctor ordered. I mixed it up in a salsa jar to save a dirty bowl, but my immersion blender clearly wanted more room to work so next time I’ll dirty a bowl to make it. And I know I’ll make it again. The recipe says to run it through the blender, but I really hate having to clean my blender for such a small amount of dressing.

I’m not a big ranch dressing eater, and I rarely buy buttermilk unless I’m whipping up a batch of buttermilk drop donuts so I may buy a bottle of ranch dressing from time to time. There is one other kind of bottled dressing that I used to buy and I had a hard time finding a replacement. I love dipping my homemade chicken tenders in honey mustard dressing, but Rachel’s recipe isn’t what I want to dip my tenders in. In fact, most of the recipes I found weren’t the nice, creamy dressing I was looking for. I ended up trying the dip recipe for The Kitchn’s Turkey Wraps with Honey Mustard Dip and it’s pretty good.

Rachel’s list of salad dressings & toppings includes two recipes I definitely want to try. One is for homemade croutons, and the other is for Caesar Croutons. I really like croutons, and I used to be able to eat them right out of the box, but lately it seems the croutons I buy are bigger than the ones I got in my 20’s. Rachel’s recipes use sliced bread, which will make for the size of croutons I’m wanting. Then the only salad topping I’ll need to make myself is bacon bits, and I need to work on my chopping skills to get good bacon bits. And, of course, I need to not eat the bacon before I have a chance to turn them into bacon bits, but I know I’m not the only one who thinks there’s no such thing as too much bacon.

I’m thankful that I got my mom’s love of cooking, and her desire to do more than your basic American meat-and-potatoes cooking. Maybe it came from living in New Orleans, where your basic meat-and-potatoes meal can be as out of place as a harpsichord at a guitar shred fest. Wherever it came from, I love to cook and the only reason I don’t try more recipes is because it’s rare to find recipes that will only feed one person. That and the fact that so many recipes I’d want to try use ingredients I don’t usually buy, and I’m concerned about being able to use up what doesn’t go into the dish.