Mimosa (Layered Fish Salad)

Ingredients:

• 9-12 oz of canned fish (the original recipe features sardines cooked in oil, which I couldn’t find here, so I used tuna chunks instead)
• 5 eggs
• Up to ½ cup of rice
• 3-4 medium carrots
• Bunch of green onion
• Mayonnaise, about 2 cups
• Ground black pepper
• Salt to taste

How to prepare, step-by-step:

1. Prepare ingredients: boil eggs (it is important to boil eggs until yolks are completely cooked through but not over cooked to get bright yellow color of the last layer); boil carrots for salad, skin them and cool them down till room temperature; boil rice for salad and cool it till room temperature as well; drain liquid from the fish, fish bones if it got some and mash fish with a fork; rinse and clean green onion:

   

2. Take a salad bowl with straight sides (or you may use a baking pan like I did), arrange layer of rice about 1.5” thick on the bottom of it and put a bit of mayonnaise on top (depends of the size of the bowl you may use only part of the boiled rice):

   

3. Arrange an even layer of fish on the top and again put a bit of mayonnaise on top:

   

4. Cover fish with an layer of finely chopped green onions, season with ground black pepper and of course a bit of mayonnaise (a bit more than on the photo below 🙂 ):

   

5. Peel all boiled eggs and separate whites from yolks, for that: cut an egg white in a circular motion (just an white, don’t cut the whole egg through):

   

   Carefully start opening the egg:

   

   Open the egg in halves, remove the half which has no yolk in it:

   

   Separate yolk and white for all eggs:

   

6. Grate egg whites on small slots, arrange them into even layer, season with salt and add a bit of mayonnaise:

   

7. Grate boiled carrots on large slots:

   

8. Make the carrot layer even and press it a bit down with your hands:

   

9. Cover with a thin layer of mayonnaise (spread it with a fork, spoon or icing spatula):

   

10. Now it is turn for egg yolks: grate them all on small slots of the grater (I usually grate over the salad it self, but if you want to grate into separate bowl first it is also fine, just make sure the bowl you are using if completely dry):

    

11. Carefully make the egg yolks layer even: you need to make sure yolks don’t get mixed with mayo while you are doing so, I believe it is easier to do with hands:

    

12. Cover pan with salad with food wrap and put it to the fridge for several hours so layers have enough time to soak through with mayonnaise before you server the salad:

    

13. Usually this salad is served in the salad bowl it is prepared in (so everybody need to “scoop” a bit of it to his plate). However I did my best to cut a piece of Salad Mimosa out of a pan for this photo so I can show you the layered nature of it: