Hi! I am Mohammad Karimy with Lebanese Taverna Cooking Classes And Catering. We are making our Tabouli salad. We have already chopped the parsley, tomato, and onion. Now we are going to chop some fresh mint. You could use fresh mint. It gives a nice flavor and chop this one fine. See you hold the leaves together as a bunch and then chop, chop, chop. Make sure again, you use a sharp knife, so you cut the vegetables, you chop the vegetables. You don t bruise the vegetables. So the mint goes here with parsley to give it the nice flavor.
And we have here some bulgur wheat, number one, I soaked it. It expands a little bit, gets softer. So this one also, you can put it with the parsley, okay, so here onion goes, I mean tomato goes with the Tabouli, that was about one tomato and about quarter of chopped onion. I use the purple one for the flavor and the bulgur was about tablespoon, so it looks little bit more when you soak it, it expands, it looks more, that was two bunches of parsley. Lemon juice- fresh lemon you cut it like in zigzag so you can easily squeeze. Now, I am going to show you look, when you cut it, it squeeze look at that fresh juice coming out of lemon and if you are strong like me, you can squeeze them really hard.
So, before you squeeze the lemon you can go to the gym and workout for a couple of hours. So make sure that you are strong enough to squeeze the lemon. See that, it s okay if you have a couple of seeds there, it is just from lemon, no big deal. And then we have some really good extra virgin olive oil. So extra virgin olive oil goes here also, it is good for you, it’s never enough of extra virgin olive oil. This is Lebanese olive oil, cold pressed, non filtered and we are going to use some black pepper, a little bit like a dash, you don t want to over power the mint with the black paper. So I use a little bit of that and a little bit salt. And this one is not open, so the easy way to open this sea salt is have a knife, hit it like that, it opens and a dash of salt because you get the sourness also from the lemon juice. You want to make sure nice, fresh look.
You mix it like this, you have all the ingredients there, see when you mix, your hand goes like this and if you know enough good songs in your head, you can sing it at the same time, mix and look at the color of this parsley, Tabouli salad, look, very nice color here. I am going to quickly rinse my hand.
Traditionally in Lebanon, they always use Romaine lettuce. Normally, they’ll use a scoop to serve, but here we do it like this, you can put it here. If you want you can put some here, here, and maybe this baby one here, since that was smaller, I am going to put two on this side, alright. This goes on the top like this and this will feed about four or five people. And quickly, I rinse my hand again to garnish this.
Garnish presentation is very important so what we are going to do we make a flower so make sure you have a sharp carving knife, we will make a rose so this is the bottom part of the rose, you are working now. You want to make sure you have a ripe tomato but not very mushy. Most of the time you don t get like that, but if you buy your tomato couple of days in advance, keep it in the kitchen in a brown bag, you will get it nice and ripe and perfect to make flowers. You see, you are just cutting the skin, not very thick not very thin and you go in a circle until the tomato is peeled. And here it’s peeled. This one you put it aside here, this outside skin is basically is going to stay out and you just roll it and like this. You see, it completely goes and once it is like this, you hold and you roll. Hold, roll, can you guys see it? All right, this is the bottom part, it goes like that and here you get your rose like that and if you feel more romantic, what you can do is you can get a mint stem and you can just stick it here anywhere you want or may be here this way or like this here and this is your finished product to your guest.
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