How To Make: Wild Rice Tabbouleh
Recently, I realized that around half of my friends are vegetarian or vegan. That probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but it did get me thinking about the kind of meals I eat and the recipes I know. Most of them follow a specific recipe: big piece of meat with vegetarian side dish. You know the kind: steak with mashed potatoes, chicken breast with rice, and tons of variations of that type. I thought it’s about time to learn some really good vegetarian meals.
Soon enough, this journey brought me to Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a Middle Eastern salad that’s originally from Lebanon and Syria but these days, you could probably find a place that makes it on your street. It’s really simple: some chopped tomatoes, some chopped onion, mint, lemon and a lot, a lot of parsley.
Sounds hard to believe, but the best tabbouleh I’ve ever had was in the airport of Marrakesh. It was an early flight from London and I hadn’t eaten at all, and the only place in the airport was this tiny café but they did have a lot of different snacks so I thought why not. The tabbouleh I was given was so perfect to me: it had exactly the right balance between parsley and lemon so that neither of them were overpowering, and it had this array of spices that made me end up having like 4 of them at once (and having the cashier look at me weirdly the whole time). I think the balance between parsley and lemon is the most important part of the dish, and I’d play around with it to see how you like it most. Usually, tabbouleh is served as a small part of a mezze or an entrée, so I replaced the usual bulgur wheat with wild rice to give it more of a “main dish” feel.
Ingredients (2 servings):
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 cucumber, chopped
200g basmati & wild rice
1 handful of mint
1 handfuls of parsley
1 lemon
1. Start out by chopping the tomatoes, the cucumber and the spices.
2. Get the rice cooking with about 1 1/2 to 2 times the amount of water. At this point you can add tons of different spices into the water to give the rice that flavor 🚀 I always, always put some kind of stock cube in, and then I usually throw in some cardamom pods, one garlic clove and some cumin.
3. Cook the rice at low temperature for around 15 to 18 minutes, but if you check and the rice has absorbed all the liquid earlier, don’t hesitate to turn the heat off!
Meanwhile, cut the lemon and the spices if you haven’t already.
4. When the rice is ready, mix it all together and it’s done! Throwing in some olive oil never hurts, and it’s easy to add more parsley or lemon if you want it to be more lemon-y or parsley-y (?). Shisha on the side is also optional but encouraged :)
Enjoy!
