2. Tabbouleh!

A few things about me and this blog before I start with the first recipe.  I hope to prevent mistakes about what to expect when reading Cookin' with Plaid.  The first warning about me is I'm not a gourmet, nor am I fixated on authenticity.  For those of you who have known me for years, know there was a time in my life when I was more like that, but I'm older and poorer and learned to be much more pragmatic about things.  However, this doesn't mean I don't get fancy at all.  Nor does it mean I refuse to use the authentic.  That would just be stupid.  I just do the best I can to make healthy food enjoyable to eat.  Sometimes that means I have to make it affordable, I can't enjoy it if I can't buy it.  

A further caveat, I think shopping with politics is a dead end street because I think could probably find something wrong with just about every food company in existence.  I'm not going to live in a cave and hunt and gather in the woods for my daily food just because food companies won't be as perfect as I want them to.  Actually I gave up radical politics years ago, I'm a confirmed city dweller and while history is interesting and quaint, I love technology too much to live in the past.  So if you have a beef with modern technology or a certain company and are protesting it for some reason, good for you, but, generally, I don't boycott.

One more thing, as if that weren't enough, I plan to be intentionally anecdotal.  As I write about my recipes and cooking, I'll include a lot of personal thoughts, ideas, and experiences.  There's plenty of places to go for the straight dope on recipes.  This blog is not a recipe encyclopedia. So, if you don't enjoy my beating around the bush, stop reading this now.


Tabbouleh!
As dark and terrible as it ended, some good things came from my former marriage, (They had to I'm not that much of a masochist!) and one of them was my ex-wife introducing me to tabbouleh.  According to Wikipedia, Lebanese tabbouleh emphasizes parsley and that's the way I like it.  Before tabbouleh parsley was just a weird green thing on my plate at certain restaurants.  I ate it occasionally and didn't think much of it either way, but I had no idea what a dynamite salad it makes.  I found quite a few recipes on the internet and tried to get the one's closest to the tabbouleh I ate at Ferdo's or Tiger Bakery in Toledo.  I got a few together and tried them out as they were written, then I tweaked them to my personal taste, budget, and ease of preparation.  I also figured out what it takes to make a big ass bowl.  So be warned this is for a big ass bowl of tabbouleh, like the kind of bowl tossed salad is kept.

Tabbouleh in a big-ass salad bowl!

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup of bulgur (cracked wheat)
3 roma tomatoes, diced
2 cucumbers, diced
4-6 green onions, chopped
2 bunches of curley parsley, chopped
1/3 cup of lemon juice
1/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil

Preparing the Bulgur 
Apparently my home town Toledo, Ohio has a significant Lebanese population, so Lebanese foods are pretty easy to find, I used to get all of my stuff from the Tiger Bakery or Kroger.  However, when I moved to Columbus a couple of years ago, and then, not too long after that, Cleveland, I found certain ingredients difficult to find. They're weren't completely absent, just not as convenient to find as it was in Toledo.  So if you're gonna look for bulgur (cracked wheat) you may have some difficulty.  Fortunately, they carry it in the "Mediterranean Foods" section of the Dave's Supermarket near my pad in Cleveland Heights.  (Cleveland doesn't have a Kroger and I miss it so.)  They have Ziyad brand burghul (another name for bulgar, but also conveniently label it "cracked wheat.")  The package displays very clear instructions on how to prepare the bulgur and a decent recipe for tabbouleh as well.  You may have to get your bulgur from Whole Foods or some other kind of health food store where they have it in bulk, It may be cheaper that way.   

It's probably best to start making the tabbouleh with the bulgur because part of the preparation is having it sit for a half hour.  First clean it by immersing the bulgur in cold water and changing the water a couple of times.  The bulgur comes in tiny pieces and I suggest using a screen strainer to drain the water.  A colander's holes are sometimes big enough for the bulgur to slip through.  You might even lose some in your screen strainer but probably not as much.  Then put it in a bowl and cover it with boiling water and set aside for at least 30 minutes.

THE VEGGIES:

I like clean veggies but I hate it when they're too wet.  So when I thoroughly rinse the curly parsley I dry them by placing them between two towels, rolling them up like sushi and setting aside while I chop tomatoes.

Although the recipe calls for regular-ass tomatoes, I saw this nifty video on youtube that showed how roma tomatoes are better for dicing.  You start by cutting off the ends and basically coring the gelatinous inner parts out.  I also use the more solid parts of the core and scrape away the jelly stuff.  The rhine and these more solid parts are easier to cut for dicing.  

Just cut off the ends to the tomato, slip your knife in an cut out the core.

Here's the roma without the core.

Now it's time to dice them into d6!

  Just throw your diced tomatoes into the salad bowl and chop some green onions.  This makes enough salad that 4 to 6 chopped green onions should be good, they're no too strong and you can pretty much use the whole bunch as packaged in the produce department.  I chop them into tiny little rings and throw them in with my tomatoes.  Go ahead and stir it a little if you want.  I like stirring as I go.

 After all of that dicing and chopping the parsley should be dry.  I unroll it slowly, then tear it by hand into pieces about the size of my index finger tip and throw it into my little food processor.

I picked up this little food processor on clearance sale at Kroger for ten bucks four years ago and I use the hell out of it.

 I chop up the parsely in the processor for probably thirty seconds or so.  Just as long as it takes to get the consistency I want.  I like it chopped rather finely.  Another preference I have is curly parsley.  Most recipes call for the flat kind. I used curly parsley once because that was all I had.  As it turned out I liked the curly better.  When you're done chopping the parsley throw it in the bowl.  

DRESSING
Most recipes insist on fresh lemons for their recipes.  This is fine, but I hate juicing by hand.  Since I figured that I was going to be making a lot of dishes with lemon juice (especially lots of tabbouleh) it wouldn't hurt to buy a bottle of Giant Eagle Brand lemon juice,

It's gourmet chef heresy, but I'm the kitchen outlaw and these work just fine for me.

Yes, that's Crisco Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It's not too pricey and tastes just fine to me.  If you just have to have oil made from olives hand pressed by a cyclops on a remote Greek island that's your business!

Just add 1/3 cup each of the lemon juice and olive oil, then add pepper and salt.  Okay, this is where I get a little fancy because I use fresh ground pepper and kosher salt.  Actually, the ground pepper is from one of those disposable pepper grinders and I don't know why kosher salt is considered fancy, its not expensive at all and highly recommended by one of my hero chef's from Food Network's Good Eats Alton Brown.  Go ahead and give it a stir!

THE FINISH!

When you return to the bulgur it should look like there's a lot more than when you started.  With clean hands, scoop up some bulgur, squeeze it over the sink to release as much water as you can and throw it in your bowl.  It gets your hands messy, but you really don't want soggy bulgur.

Now stir all the ingredients to spread them evenly as you can throughout the mixture.  Cover your bowl and place in refrigerator to marinade for at least two hours.  You may notice the salad gets a bit watery as it sets.  I've seen this happen with every batch I've made and even with the tabbouleh in the delis and stores, so it's nothing new.  You may want to drain a little, but it doesn't hurt not too.  Stirring it before you serves it helps too.  Tabbouleh is pretty resilient and tastes fresh even after a few days in the fridge.  However, if your as big of a fan as I am it won't need to last that long. 

You may notice that I don't include mint in my recipe.  This may be another heresy committed by the kitchen outlaw, but I found that mint is expensive, it bruises and spoils easy, and doesn't contribute a whole lot to the flavor.  I made several batches of tabbouleh without mint and I don't miss it. 

One of my hero celebrity chefs, I love how Alton Brown combines cooking, science, history, and sketch comedy into his show Good Eats on the Food Network.