Salade composée with tuna, asparagus and new potatoes

My mom is not a big fan of chocolate. She doesn’t like sweets that much at all, except a bite of really good lemon tart, a nibble of a palmier or maybe a few bites of a really good crème brulée. We’re similar, like that: much more likely to go for a cheese plate than a dessert menu, and even more likely to prefer something like a giant salad in place of any sweet treat. A lot of people my age look for differences between them and their mothers, trying their hardest to distance themselves from the woman who brought them into this world. Maybe it’s because of the physical distance that I try so hard to find each and every similarity between my mother and me. We’re far from the same person–she loves pearls and I favor hemp braids, she lives for cocktail parties and I’m happy to sit on my floor and drink wine from Dixie cups–but then again, I used to dress exclusively in combat boots, so I suppose there’s still time for certain things to change.

She does love Paris, though, where one can find–in addition to good chocolate, crème brulée and palmiers… incredible views of things that would otherwise seem quite pedestrian. The Eiffel Tower peeks out from a row of houses, a moustached man with a booming laugh and a smoldering Gauloise is somehow so much more perfect than the same, slightly drunken man outside a local watering hole in any other city.

My mom reminds me of that.

Not the Gauloise-smoking man (though she’d probably give him the same look as me and share a smile behind a menu). I mean that understated perfection. She somehow manages to do everything and never seem busy, to remember everything she has to do without going insane, to have the equivalent of three of someone else’s days of work, running around, giving rides, making phone calls, meeting friends… and still have time to come home and, over a leisurely glass of wine, listen to the stories of everyone else’s day, laughing at the appropriate moments (she has a laugh you never forget).

My mother stopped working as a nursery school teacher when I was very young to make taking care of me and my siblings her full-time responsibility, and for a very long time, she–and not any place that she so lovingly decorated every year when we moved (16 times when I was growing up)–was home to me. She was very rarely absent, but I felt it when she was: the house felt empty somehow, dark and uncomfortable, even if she had only left for a few hours. There was–and still is–something comforting about hearing her voice on the phone, her exaggerated friendliness for even the most unpleasant of interlocutors, the faint jingle of her charm bracelets as she prepared dinner. Maybe that’s why I feel the emptiness so drastically when she leaves Paris at the end of her too-short biannual visits, visits punctuated with laughter and stories and wine, with her token exclamations and nearly caricatured praise of the city we both love. In a way, my mother will always be home for me.

Most of you, today, are posting delicious towering cakes with meringue or pink flowers or chocolate, and while I find it all beautiful, it’s not what my mother would want. A few years ago, I made her a lemon-olive oil cake with lemon curd for Mother’s Day, but I’m not with her today, and since TCB hates everything lemon, I’m going in a different direction. I’ve already told you about my mother’s love for salades composées, but she also loves asparagus. I like to think that this salad–with tuna, potatoes, mustard vinaigrette and roasted white-and-green asparagus–would be the sort of thing we could pick at and chat over.

Oh, who am I kidding… we could do that over a box of Cheez-Its.

Salade composée with tuna, asparagus and new potatoes

500 g. asparagus, trimmed and peeled
1 tsp. olive oil
salt

250 g. new potatoes, cooked and cooled
2 tsp. olive oil
1/4 tsp. whole grain mustard
1/2 tsp. honey
1/2 tsp. cider vinegar
salt and pepper

1 can tuna, packed in oil, drained
1/4 red onion, minced

1/2 head leaf lettuce
salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Toss the asparagus in olive oil and season to taste with salt. Roast until tender, about 20 minutes, tossing once. Cool in the fridge if you have time. (Can be made a day ahead.

Slice the cooked, cooled new potatoes into rounds. Whisk together dressing ingredients and toss with potatoes.

Combine the tuna and red onion.

Wash and dry lettuce and toss with a couple of pinches of salt. Arrange components over the lettuce.