What drew me to Israel this week was one of the national dishes, an Israeli salad. I was tempted to hold off on Israel for another, less ambitious cooking weekend so I could make the other national dish - falafel. But in the end, for simplicity's sake, I went with the salad.A traditional Israeli salad is basically cucumbers and tomatoes diced very finely. The dicing is what makes this combo distinct to the country. Apparently the ability to dice the vegetables so finely is the mark of a truly wonderful kibbutz cook.
The vegetables are dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, parlsey and green onions. I used this as a guide to come up with a very, very basic recipe.
Now, since I'm no master kibbutz cook, I relied on my veggie chopper to make this dish as authentic as possible. The veggie chopper was a birthday gift from my sister last year. She fell in love with it at a Williams-Sonoma cooking class on making salsa. The beauty of the veggie chopper is that you have total control over how finely your vegetables get chopped, moreso than with a food processor. It's manually operated with a cord that when you pull, turns the blades and chops the veggies. I love it for dicing onions. For this recipe I also used the veggie chopped to cut the parsley and scallions.
Ingredients:
1 hothouse cucumber
2 tomatoes
About 2 tbsps. fresh lemon juice
About 2 tbsps. olive oil
Salt
Pepper
3 tbsps. chopped flat-leaf parsley
3 tbsps. chopped scallions
What to do:
Dice the cucumbers and tomatoes using preferred method. Add lemon juice and olive oil and toss. Then add diced parsley and scallions. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
No comments:
Post a Comment