Salad days




 I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a huge salad fan. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t dislike them, but there is just something about digging into a pile of leafy greens that doesn’t really turn my crank.  Of course, I appreciate a good salad, maybe one with strawberries and almonds, or feta and quinoa, but overall, given the choice of a vegetable alternative, I would veer away.

Fattoush, however, is an exception.

I’ve always liked fattoush. The crisp bright colors – magenta radish, cherry red tomato and cool green cucumber – are so attractive, bathed in a lemony, creamy, garlicky dressing, and I love the crispy pieces fried pita bread that finish the dish off. I came across this recipe while leafing through a new cookbook that I acquired over Christmas called “Jerusalem”, a wonderful cross-cultural compendium of favorite recipes from two Jerusalemites and celebrated UK chefs, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. The modifications that I made cut the preparation time by omitting the fermentation stage of the dressing, allowing the salad to be made all at once. The result is a fresh, filling and wonderfully light – and no need for leafy greens!

Na’ama’s fattoush
Adapted from “Jerusalem: A cookbook” by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Ingredients

-       Scant 1 cup fat free Greek yogurt
-       1 tbsp milk
-       1 large piece of pita, chopped in 1 inch pieces
-       2 large tomatoes, chopped
-       ¼  cup radishes, sliced thinly
-       2 green onions, sliced thinly
-       1 large cucumber, diced
-       1 tbsp flat leafed parsley, chopped, plus more for garnish
-       2 cloves of garlic, crushed
-       2 tbsp lemon juice, plus more to taste
-       Scant ¼ cup olive oil
-       1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
-       1 ½ tsp salt, plus more to taste

1.     Arrange pita on a large baking tray and bake for about 10 minutes, or until crisp. Set aside.

2.     Whisk together Greek yogurt, milk, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil until smooth. Add salt and pepper and adjust to taste.

3.     Combine all other ingredients, except of pita, in a large bowl. Add dressing and mix until combined.

4.     Chill. Top with pita and garnish with parsley just before serving. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a burnt
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook&
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe
Read more