Hi, welcome back to Dede’s Mediterranean Kitchen. Today, I'm going to teach you how to make a wonderful salad called Tabouleh. This is a Mediterranean salad that could be eaten in the afternoon, late afternoon, for dinner, as a side dish, whatever you like. It's a light salad and it's very refreshing.
Now the main ingredients of the salad are parsley, tomatoes, green onions, and lemon juice. This salad is pretty easy to put together. You're just going to pay attention to how you're topping it and don’t hurt yourself.
First, we’re going to begin with the tomatoes. Now, I've already diced up about 2 tomatoes. This salad that I'm showing you the ingredients served, between 4 or 5, 6 people, depending on how much you really like it. The serving that I'm showing you now is for 4 people, so alright, let's have 2 tomatoes. You can use 2 ½, 3 tomatoes, depending on your liking. With the parsley and onion, you can do those a day or two ahead and just keep them sealed real tight in a refrigerator and then when you're ready, just chop off the tomatoes and then put the salad together.
We’re going to start with the tomatoes, put them in a bowl. And then they're right here. Next thing you want to do is the onions. Again, I've already chopped that, you want about 5 or 6 long green onions or charlottes. Green onions have a more robust flavor, so it's good for the salads, since everything in salads is pretty mild, except for the lemon juice and the onions. I've already chopped some up. I'm going to show you how to chop these out, just put these onions over the yellow ones. And just add these onions to your tomatoes.
Next and most important ingredient of the salad is parsley. Now again, depending on how many people are going to be eating this and depending on the size of the parsley, because sometimes you get a little bunch, sometimes you get a big bunch. You want about four cups of parsley you know a cup per person. After the core is chopped, now I'm going to add this onion to the rest of the salad. This is going to be a great. There's so many flavors in this and it's such a light salad.
Put about 3 sprigs of fresh mint. Now you’ve added your fresh mint to the rest of the salad, and next thing you want to do is an ingredient that you can find in a lot of gourmet stores and a lot of the general grocery stores. It's called burgul. Now, the dry was about four cups and when you rinse it and then just let it sit for like 15 minutes, in turned into about half a cup. Now you want to do is add this to the rest of your salad. That is very healthy. Now, what you're going to do is add some dried mint. Dried mint can be found in all of your seasoning house at the grocery store. You want to add about a tsp of dry mint.
Also, again according to your liking, some people like a lot of sauce, some people don’t. You want to do add about half tsp to a tsp of salt, depending on what you like.
Now I've already squeezed about 2 ½ lemons. I have another lemon here. Add to the rest of your salad. You want to use extra virgin olive oil, because this has the most taste from the olives when it's first pressed. You want to add about half cup of olive oil. Now, I usually eyeball it, but some people like to measure exact, the amounts. I’m going to eyeball it to about a half cup, gives it a good taste, keeps the salad fresh and it goes well with the lemon juice. Give it a good mix. Make sure all the ingredients are combined.
Now, another thing you can do after you're fixing all these ingredients together, some people like to add a little bit kick to it. You can add about half tsp to a tsp to as much as you like with some cayenne pepper. Now a lot of the dried mint, you can find this in your seasoning house, at your grocery store. I'm adding about half a tsp here and then give it a good mix.
Next, I'm going to show you how to serve it. What I have here is our forth of iceberg lettuce. Here are those, you don’t want to small, because they really don’t hold much. You stuff these with the tabouleh and you can serve it, if you're serving individual plates, you can put this on a plate.
Very healthy, the ingredients, not very expensive, you get them, most of them at your local grocery store, it's a great dish to serve and impress your friends with. So try it out and have a great time and tune in again for the next dish at Dede’s Mediterranean Kitchen.
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