Tabbouleh

To aid us in our quest for cooking more middle eastern food, we bought another book, Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food, to get more inspiration.

As it turns out our copy of the book is flawed by a production error - more specifically the same set of pictures appears twice, leaving us guessing as to which pictures we are missing. Amazon.com wasn't able to tell us whether it was just or copy, or their entire set - so instead they refunded us the value of the book, and let us keep it at the same time. Hooray.

First up in a string of post on the subject is a variation on tabbouleh, one of several bulgur salads.

Ingredients:
- 2 dL (4/5 cup) bulgur
- cold water
- juice of 1 1/2 lemon
- 5 tomatoes, diced
- 2 small onions, finely diced
- fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped
- fresh mint, chopped
- salt, pepper
- olive oil

The bulgur was soaked in cold water for 10-15 minutes, then drained and put in a large bowl. The lemon juice and tomatoes were added and the bowl was left for half an hour to let the bulgur absorb the juices and turn tender. [1] The rest of the ingredients were mixed in.

Tabbouleh might be eaten as a stand alone dish (supposedly it is traditional to scoop it up with lettuce leaves), or as a side dish.

[1] At this point the texture of the bulgur still seemed somewhat 'uncooked', which was a little worrisome, but in the end the result was just fine.