Basically tabbouleh is just a parsley salad.

Quite often you might just want a bit of parsley to garnish something or to add extra flavour to a stew or to make herb dumplings. But it’s not usually possible to buy a couple of sprigs of parsley. More likely you end up with a fairly big bunch of it – so what to do rather than wasting it? Make tabbouleh! Here’s a very simple recipe that’s quick and easy to make.

Ingredients

• A bunch of parsley
  (It’s more traditional to make tabbouleh using flat leaf parsley but I made mine, which is pictured above, from curly leaf parsley. It doesn’t really make much difference.)
• A small red onion or a couple of spring onions
  (The amount depends on how much you like onions.)
• A couple of tomatoes
• A handful of burghul wheat
  (I didn’t have any so I substituted couscous, which worked fine.  To be honest, you can still make a tasty parsley salad without either of these.)
• Mint leaves
  (I cheated by adding a couple of teaspoons of mint sauce from a jar.)
• A lemon
  (Again, something else that I didn’t have so I used lime.)
• An oil and vinegar dressing – see method below

Method

First prepare your burghul or couscous according to the instructions on the packet. This is usually a simple case of pouring boiling water over it and letting it stand for a while to soften. You might as well do this first so that it’s ready for use when you’ve done the other tasks.

Remove the stalks from the parsley and discard them. (You can of course use them for various other things such as making stock etc, but we don’t want them in our tabbouleh.) Wash and finely chop the parsley. Bung it in a mixing bowl.

Finely chop your onion and dice the tomatoes. Bung them into the bowl too.

Now for the dressing, it’s very important to have a flavoursome dressing or you might as well forget making tabbouleh as it’ll just be a bland offering. There are lots of fancy recipes around for making a basic vinaigrette, but I like Jamie Oliver’s very simple method. Basically he says to start with one part vinegar to three parts oil, season with salt and pepper, put it into a small jar and give it a good shake to emusify it. Easy! Taste it and adjust the seasoning if necessary - add more oil if it’s too vinegary etc.

Obviously better quality oils and vinegars produce better quality dressings. For my tabbouleh I used olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Add the dressing to the salad and give it a good mix. Jamie recommends using your (clean!) fingers for this process but I seem to manage fine with a wooden spoon.

Now add your chopped mint leaves (or mint sauce). I started with one teaspoon but after tasting the result I added another. Always be guided by your own taste!

Finally squeeze the lemon or lime juice in and taste. Add more if you like, and more salt and pepper if necessary. It sounds like a bit of a faff but once you’re in the habit of making your own vinaigrette and salad dressings, it’s really quick and easy to make a tasty tabbouleh.

This chicken sandwich makes a great snack or even a quick meal in minutes if you’re not ravenously hungry. It’s certainly filling enough to make a decent-sized lunch for most people.

Ingredients (per person):

• 1 wholemeal sub roll (or any roll, or two slices of bread)
• 1 boneless chicken breast
• Salad ingredients such as salad leaves, tomato, spring onion – whatever you fancy, really. You can also use whatever salad dressing you like, perhaps Caesar salad dressing, ranch (buttermilk) dressing or blue cheese dressing.
• Mayonnaise (or butter, if you prefer)
• Seasoned flour (optional)

Method:

Wash and pat dry the boneless chicken breast. If you want to keep things really simple, just fry up the whole breast in hot oil. Once the meat is sealed, turn the heat down to let the inside of the chicken breast cook properly. If the juices run clear and not pink then it’s cooked. (There is a risk of salmonella food poisoning from eating chicken that’s not been properly cooked.)

If you want to go for something a bit tastier then dip the chicken breast into seasoned flour, shake off the excess flour and fry it up in the same way as above.

(Seasoned flour is very easy to make. Just put a handful of flour in a bowl, add salt and pepper, paprika, dried herbs such as thyme or oregano, or anything else you fancy. If you can do this, you’re half-way to being able to make your own version of KFC. I’ll do a recipe for Southern Fried Chicken soon. Despite KFC’s secrecy about their recipe, it’s not difficult to make a tasty home-made version!)

I prefer to cut the chicken breast into pieces and dip it into the seasoned flour before cooking. You get more flavour of the seasoning that way, but it’s up to you.

Once the chicken is cooked, it’s a simple assembly job. Split the roll in half, spread with mayo (much nicer than butter), add the slices of tomato, the salad leaves and the chopped spring onions, and pop the pieces of cooked chicken on top. Add a bit of whatever dressing you fancy – or don’t. And voilà – a quick and easy recipe for a filling snack.

I guess it might seem odd to include a recipe for something as simple as a chicken sandwich. After all, a chicken sandwich could simply be a piece of cooked chicken meat between two slices of bread. But I’m sure you’ll agree that this version looks a lot more appetising than your bog-standard chicken sarnie. Try it and see!

There’s a lot you can do with cubes of stewing steak – goulash soup, beef & Guinness pie, brown Windsor soup, curries, meat pasties, chilli con carne… you name it! I like to buy a kilo at a time and do two or three different dishes with it – that way we get some ready meals for the freezer as well as the night’s dinner.

BUT be warned – if you don’t prepare your meat properly it’s very easy to end up with tough, leathery, stringy, tasteless grey lumps.

First, you should seal the meat by frying it in very hot oil. This process browns the meat – giving it great flavour as well as colour! – and it starts to make its own tasty gravy too. After you’ve sealed it, you can proceed to make your stew or pie filling. If you chuck it all in, meat and liquid together at once, it’ll boil and you’ll get those grey, tasteless, and stringy lumps of meat I was talking about. And it’s not even as if the flavour goes into the liquid instead – that’ll just taste watery, like an over-diluted beef stock cube.

Anyway, once the steak cubes have been browned off (just like the ones in this picture on the left) you can add the liquid and other ingredients and then slow-cook the whole thing. Either you can simmer it for a couple of hours on a low heat, or if you’re in a rush you can stick it in a pressure cooker. The quality of the beef round where we live isn’t so great, so I’d generally pressure-cook a kilo for about 40 minutes.

That’s just the basic technique. Some recipes call for the meat to be browned together with other flavourings. So for instance Jamie Oliver calls for Marmite and Worcestershire sauce to be added while the meat’s browning when making his brown Windsor soup recipe. Or if you were making a curry you’d probably want to cook off the spices in the pot first, then add the meat to brown in the spices – yum!

Cooking is an art not a science so, as long as you follow some basic techniques correctly to avoid spoiling the food, you can have fun experimenting with your own ideas according to your own taste.