Quinoa Tabouli Salad with Heirloom Tomatoes

[Don’t want the whole long-winded intro? Click HERE and scroll down to go to the recipe]
My mom is a horrible cook (Hi, Mom – you can leave your rebuttal in the comments!). She will disagree, and as proof insist that all her friends now ask for her recipes on a regular basis. To that, I will say: some people lose their sense of hearing as they age and others, apparently, their sense of taste.

To be fair, I guess the main issue is that she hated cooking. Loathed it. My mom was one of the first once-a-month cookers, although she adapted the concept a little: instead of cooking a variety of things on one day to freeze and eat for the month, Mom just made one recipe and served it all month long. I can never eat porcupine meatballs (meatballs with rice inside) again. She also adapted EVERYTHING to be able to cook it in our electric fry pan. No matter what the recipe said, that’s what she cooked it in.

To make things even more interesting, Mom also liked to just throw anything together, and no substitution was too far afield (out of fresh mozzarella? Substitute velveeta…or cottage cheese….or potato flakes). I tend to hate most of these improvised dishes, because there’s always something too weird for me. This approach is very cost-effective, but the refrigerator-roulette approach is not for everyone. Thankfully for my parents marriage, my dad loves whatever my mom throws together. But somehow, spinach salad with asiago cheese, sunflower seeds, craisins, olives, and hot dog slices just doesn’t do it for me.

So when I set off on my own, I decided I was going to learn to cook what I liked. As one might expect, this quest started off with the acquisition of a bunch of cookbooks. I have made and loved many wonderful recipes over the years. In my quest to learn how to cook reliably edible and often tasty meals, I have leaned heavily on the recipes within these cookbooks. This has been a good thing (edible is good), but lately I have felt like I wasn’t really cooking. The great cooks I know (like my friend Giseli), use what they know about taste and how food works, and just combine what they like. The other problem of only using a recipe is that I feel like I waste too much food , and spend too much on ingredients. Very few recipes use exactly the portion one can buy at the grocery store of any one item, so I end up with odds and ends. Since I don’t have a recipe that uses EXACTLY what I have left, I will often purchase more expensive ingredients in order to use another up, and/or let a lot go to waste. One of my missions this year is to cook more without a book – to trust myself with regard to taste, and to use ingredients more efficiently.

So this finally brings me to last week when I was staring at the fridge. I had some leftover parsley, and had eaten middle eastern food for lunch…so I started thinking… I could make a tabouli salad. Now here’s where I got a bit like Mom: I wanted to make my salad with quinoa instead of bulgur wheat, but I figured that was a straight enough substitution. (See, Mom – substitutions within limits are good!) I thought about what I liked about tabouli salad..the fresh crunch and “green” taste of the parsley, the bright bitterness of the lemon, the contrast of the red tomatoes…and to, well, wing it.
[The recipe is after the jump]

Quinoa Tabouli Salad

This is a great “clean out the fridge” salad. I like my tabouli really tart, so that’s what this reflects. I found the mixture also took much more salt than I thought it would. I added another teaspoon at the end (reflected in the recipe below). I also really love parsley. It’s traditional in the recipe, but you can be flexible (like I’m learning to do…).

Dressing:
1 clove garlic, minced
Juice of 2 lemons
Olive oil (I like about 2 parts lemon to one part olive oil)
1-2 teaspoons kosher salt (I felt like it needed the other teaspoon – you won’t need this much if using table salt)
Freshly ground pepper
Salad:
About 2 cups cooked quinoa (You could also make this with couscous, bulgar (like the traditional), or even rice.)
One pound tomatoes, cut into bite-size pieces (for cherry tomatoes, I’d do quarters or eighths; for grape tomatoes, quarters or halves; you could also dice up roma tomatoes)
½ bunch parsley, minced very very finely
About ½ of a red onion, diced finely

Other things you could add (be creative!):
Grated carrots
Finely minced mint
Finely minced basil
Raisins or other dried fruit
Chopped nuts
Lemon zest (to the dressing or the salad)
Olives
Feta cheese
Scallions

Whisk dressing together in a small dish with a fork. Mix other ingredients in a salad bowl. Pour the dressing over and toss to combine. Let sit for at least one hour for full flavor (tossing occasionally if you think of it). I like it at room temperature for eating. It even tastes great after a night in the fridge – Dave and I fought over the leftovers.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 11:03 AM and is filed under In the Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.