Chickpea and goat cheese salad

We've decided on a salad again tonight since (once again) it is going to be a very hot day. I am also coming to quite enjoy those hearty salads that are meal in itself.

Once again I've gone to my "Mmmm ... salad" cookbook and have found a salad that looks like it will be rather hearty and yummy.

Here's the RECIPE for our dinner tonight:

Ingredients:

• 1 can chickpeas drained

• 2 spring onions finely chopped

• 50g red peppers (capsicum) diced

• 15ml / 1 tablespoon fresh chopped parsley

• 100g cherry tomatoes sliced in half

• 50g rocket

• 30g goat cheese sliced or crumbled to serve

Dressing:

• 1 teaspoon olive oil

• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

• 1/2 teaspoon runny honey

• 1 clove garlic peeled and crushed or finely chopped

Instructions:

• Rinse the chickpeas and put into a bowl.

• Add spring onions, red pepper, parsley and cherry tomatoes, mix well.

• To make dressing, which together the oil, vinegar, honey and garlic and stir into the chickpeas.

• Serve on a bed of rocket with the goat cheese sprinkled over.

I forgot to buy parsley when I went to the grocery store, so I just used the leftover coriander paste that I had from the bean and feta cheese that I made the other day.

Instead of cherry tomatoes, I used grape tomatoes just because I think grape tomatoes taste better and I like them better. :-)

Turkish bean salad

The Boy has decided that he wants to cook more meals entirely on his own, which I'm very happy about.

He recently got this cookbook from one of his online author friends called "A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey" by Sibel Hodge on his Kindle and has been excited to try some of the recipes. It's a beautifully written and edited book with lovely pictures for each of the recipes. There's also a great review on the book here.

So far The Boy is doing pretty well. He's managing to cook most of the things he's decided to cook on his own without consulting me too much. I'm enjoying the time off. :-)

The Boy loves beans so when he came across the recipe for a bean salad he bookmarked it to try. This one in English is simply known as "Bean Salad" though in Turkish it is known as "Baharatli Kuru Fasulye" which I also assume translates to "Bean Salad". :-)

Here's the RECIPE for the bean salad:

Ingredients:

• 1 can of white beans (haricot / butter beans / cannellini)
• 1 red onion - diced
• 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes
• 1 green chili - diced and fried
• 1 small red pepper (capsicum) - diced and friend
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon tomato puree
• Salt to taste
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• 2 cloves garlic - crushed and chopped
• 1 tablespoon olive oil for frying
• Chopped coriander (for garnish)

Instructions:

• Drain can of beans, then rinse and place in a bowl.
• Fry onion, chili, garlic and pepper in olive oil until soft and add to beans.
• Add the rest of the ingredients into the bowl with the beans as well.
• Mix all the ingredients together, garnish with chopped coriander and serve.

This recipe serves 4 people as a starter or two people as a main for dinner, though a bit on the light side.

I don't think The Boy did much different to this recipe aside from the lemon juice. He used the juice of half a lemon, which is more than 2 teaspoons worth of lemon juice, but that's okay cos we like our lemon juice. :-)

Oh, I just checked ... instead of a whole red onion, he only used half a red onion because it seemed like a lot of onion, and he used 2 green chilis instead of one because we like our chili.

There was a lot of slicing and dicing with this recipe, all into small pieces and I'm glad that it was The Boy doing it rather than me. Can't say that I'm a fan of the fine dicing work.

This recipe was delicious and certainly quite different from what we normally eat. The Boy loves beans, so this worked out well for him. It was zingy and tasty. I think next time though, we might have something else to accompany the dish since just this dish alone was not quite enough just for dinner. I think this makes a much better side dish than a main dish.

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Bean salad with feta cheese

Last night, The Boy decided that I would make dinner instead of him and it's still horribly hot here ... I expect it will continue to be horribly hot since it is Summer, but I decided on a bean salad.

When I told The Boy about it, his reply was that he was not keen on it since he wasn't crazy about a dish full of French (green) beans. I told him that it was just too bad because I had bought all the ingredients and he had to eat it anyway, plus the fact that he was the one who tagged the recipe in the cookbook anyway. Really, he didn't put up too much of a protest and he's very good at eating whatever I place in front of him.

This recipe is from my "Mmmm ... Salads" cookbook, which is part of the LOVE FOOD imprint by Parragon Books UK which has done a series of cookbooks for salads, pasta, fish, etc. I tried to find this book online but have not been able to do so. I bought it from a local discount bookstore that buys up big lots of out of print or excess stock books and sells them at a low price.

Here's a RECIPE for this delicious salad:

Ingredients:

• 350g French (green) beans trimmed
• 1 Spanish (red) onion, diced
• 3 - 4 tablespoons of chopped fresh coriander
• 2 radishes, thinly sliced
• 75g feta cheese, drained and crumbled
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano or 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar or fruit vinegar
• 5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 3 ripe tomatoes, cut into wedges
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

• Place the beans in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 5 minutes or until tender when pierced with a fork. Drain and halve.
• Transfer the beans to a bowl and add the onion, coriander, radishes and cheese.
• Sprinkle the oregano over the salad, then grind pepper over to taste. Whisk the vinegar and olive oil together and pour over the salad. Toss gently to mix well.
• Transfer to a serving platter, add the tomato wedges and serve at once or chill until ready to serve.

Once again, I didn't follow the recipe exactly, this time though, due to some shopping and grocery store restrictions. We went to get our groceries on Christmas Eve before the grocery stores shut for two days over Christmas and Boxing Day and a lot of the product had been picked over. We managed most of the ingredients but could not find a few of them.

To start, instead of leaving the green beans long and then halving them, I trimmed the green beans and then cut them into 1 or 1.5 inch lengths depending on the size of the green bean. I bought about 3 large handfuls of green beans but I don't know what weight that was since the store didn't have a scale for me to weigh the beans in.

I couldn't find any fresh coriander from the store because they were completely out of herbs (and really, it was our fault because we didn't get to the store till late afternoon as we were waiting on a delivery). Instead, I used the Gourmet Garden Coriander paste which came in a tube.

I didn't use any radishes because The Boy doesn't like radishes and also because there were none to be had at the grocery store. When we came across radishes at another fruit and vegetable specialty store a few days later, they sold them in bunches of 6 and I had no use for the remaining 4 radishes, plus they wouldn't just sell me 2 radishes, and The Boy once again reiterated that he did not like radishes. So, no radishes were harmed in the making of this salad. ;-p

With the feta cheese, I used the Coles brand Australian Feta Cheese which is pretty hard and doesn't crumble well, so I broke a 200g package into half which ended up more like 2/3 and 1/3 since it didn't break evenly in half and I used the larger piece. I just cut those into small pieces.

For tomatoes, I used the Perino - Sweet Snacking Tomatoes which are like grape tomatoes just because that is what I had in the fridge. I used just a little over a half a punnet of it and instead of adding it at the end, I included them into the bowl and mixed the dressing through it as well.

I cooked the beans, keeping them only lightly cooked and crunchy by steaming them for about 3 minutes rather than boiling them and then putting them into ice cold water to stop them from continuing to cook.

After cutting up all the other ingredients, I put the beans, onion, feta cheese and tomato into large bowl. I also had a piece of cooked chicken breast leftover from another meal and I cut them into small pieces and included that into the mix.

I then mixed up the dressing in a glass jar, which included the coriander paste, olive oil, dried oregano, salt, pepper and red wine vinegar. I then closed the lid of the jar and shook the jar vigorously to mix up the dressing which I then poured over the salad in the bowl.

Once the dressing was poured into the bowl, I mixed it through the salad thoroughly and then the salad was ready for serving.

The salt and pepper was to taste, so just use the amount that is suitable for you. Something to note though, since the feta cheese has salt in it already, there's no need for a lot of salt.

This is an extremely tasty and hearty salad and served a generous portion meal for the both of us.

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