Tabbouleh

Hi, everyone!  Happy Tuesday!  Today I'm going to make up one of my favorite side dishes, a lovely tabbouleh salad.  If you're not familiar with tabbouleh, it is a quinoa with vegetables and feta cheese!  What's not to like?!

My husband doesn't care for feta cheese, or quinoa (I'm working with him on that one), so I like to make this while he's out of town!  This is a pretty simple dish, and it is great served room temperature, or chilled.   This is great as a side dish for a variety of main dishes, and so fresh for spring or summer! 

Here's your grocery list for this one:
1 C quinoa

2 C chicken stock

1 Tbs olive oil

1 C cherry tomatoes

1/2 C chopped tomatoes

1 C chopped English cucumbers

1 C feta cheese

1 C parsley, chopped

That's it!  It comes together pretty quickly, the longest part of this recipe is just cooking up the quinoa, and that's mostly hands off!

To start off with, measure out the quinoa, and heat the olive oil in a medium sized sauce pan over medium heat.  After your oil has been heating for a minute or so, put the quinoa in and let it toast, over medium heat, for about three minutes.  You don't want it to get any color, but lightly toasting this grain brings out a lovely nutty flavor.  On a side note, lets ignore the awful scratched pot that I'm using.  I've only been beating it up for about 10 years now...

After a few minutes of the quinoa toasting, add in the chicken stock, bring up to a boil, cover, and reduce to a simmer for about 15 minutes.  

While your quinoa is cooking, lets get your veggies together!  I had about half of a tomato I needed to use up, so I just chopped it up along with cutting the cherry tomatoes in half; salt your tomatoes and set those aside.

You could easily use a regular cucumber for this, but I love using an English cucumber for this; they're wrapped in plastic, and you don't have to peel them.  They are so crunchy and add a lot of texture to this dish!  Once you have the cucumber chopped up into bite size pieces (I ended up using about half of this cucumber), chop up the parsley!  

After the quinoa has cooked, turn off the heat, and let it sit, covered, for another 5 minutes.  You'll know the quinoa has cooked all of the way through when it is translucent.  Mix in the cucumber and tomatoes, gently folding them in.

Fold in the parsley and move to a mixing bowl, and let cool completely.   

Once your tabbouleh has cooled, fold in the feta cheese and you can either serve this right away, or put it in the fridge for when you're ready to serve it!  Honestly, the longer this has to sit, the better the flavors marry!