Hallo! Let's make Tabbouleh.
Are you familiar with tabbouleh? Also known as tabouli. No? You say it "tah-boo-lee."
Still no?
It looks like this:
And it tastes like parsley dreams. And it's healthy x 1000.
Tabbouleh and I go way back. My dad's BFF (what, dad's have BFFs) is Lebanese, and introduced us to tabbouleh and all kind of other middle eastern/mediterranean delights when I was just a wee tot. I was totally the girl with the weird lunch.
So, let's make some!
here's what you need:
3 (yep) bunches of curly parsley
2 bunches of green onions
9 lemons (or enough lemons to yield 1 cup of juice. this meant nine lemons for me)
6 firm roma tomatoes
1 cup of fine (also called light) bulgar wheat
extra virgin olive oil (rachael ray style)
and salt.
You also need a good chef's knife, because here's the bad news: you're going to hand chop most of this yourself. This took me about an hour last night, start to finish, but it's my lunch for the entire week, got me caught up on Parenthood, and was weirdly therapeutic. A win win win. Anyway, you need that knife to be nice and sharp so your chopping is more therapeutic and less frustrating.
(This is a Shun knife, and it doesn't mess around. )
First, rinse all that glorious produce under cold water in a large strainer. Now it's time to squeeze your lemons of their juices. If you're using bottled lemon juice right now, I don't want to know about it. Once your juice is all ready to go and free of seeds, microwave it for about 45 seconds, and pour it over the cup of bulgar wheat you have in a large bowl. Put a kitchen towel over the bowl and let it hang out.
Then take your first bunch of parsley (or about half of it) and hold it with the leaves facing downward into a salad spinner. Then take your knife and gently cut it away from the large stems. Do this until all of your parsley is off those big crazy stems.
Then spin spin spin in the salad spinner to get the parsley good and dry. At this point, you could garnish about 1000 plates at a restaurant, or you could keep going and make tabbouleh. Do the tabbouleh.
Working in batches, start chopping the parsley! You want it relatively fine, but not parsley mush. If we wanted that, we would just use a food processor and call it a day. If you had any big stems hiding in here, now would be the time to pick them out before you get chopping. You will be so glad you did this by hand (I hope).
About 30 minutes later, you will have a big bowl o' chopped parsley. The hard part is over.
Now it's time for green onions! Chop off the nasty walrus looking bottoms, and chop all the green and white parts until they're about the same size as your parsley. Throw 'em in with the parsley.
Now it's tomato time. Cut off the very top (weird brown umbilical cord to the vine) of the tomato, and halve that baby top to bottom. Good? Now cut each half in long strips, and then cross wise to have a dice. If these tomatoes are super seedy/juicey, you could omit some of the juice and seeds, but if not, don't worry about it. Do this until all the tomatoes are dicey and let them join the parsley green onion party. It's like Christmas in there!
Now, remember that bulgar that you have soaking in a hot tub of lemon juice? Have a peak at it and a little taste. It should be soft to al dente. Perfect. Pour it into the Christmas party and get your stir on. Stir stir stir. Now add olive oil - a little at a time. And kosher salt. I probably added 1 - 2 tablespoons of salt total.
it should look like this when it's done!
If you're like me, you want a bowl now because you can hardly handle the suspense. That's fine. Give in to temptation. But it's MUCH better if you let all of those flavors fall in love and get married for a few hours or overnight. I've had a big scoop of tabbouleh with lunch every day this week and it just keeps getting bettah. I think you could probably keep it about 5 days in the fridge. YUM!
