I enjoy a salad nearly every day of the week. I love to crunch with the self-satisfaction of following journalist Michael Pollan’s sage advice for healthy eating: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
It’s easy to eat plants when they’re covered in bacon and blue cheese, which defeats the point. Same goes for salads swimming in dressing and packed with deep-fried croutons. That’s why I like to make fattoush. This Middle Eastern toasted bread and vegetable salad satisfies my inner rabbit perfectly.
I’ve enjoyed fattoush since reading about it in “Flatbreads & Flavors, A Baker’s Atlas” by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. The intrepid authors explain that “the root word for all the dishes in the Arab world using toasted flatbread is fatta – hence fatteh, fattoush, etc. As with most home-cooked dishes, there are a great many versions of fattoush, especially in Syria and Lebanon.
The salad recipe in their cookbook simply mixes cucumbers, tomatoes, green onions and parsley with a lemon vinaigrette and toasted pita. These days, I mix up a version inspired by a local restaurant that adds plenty of lettuce, fresh purslane and green bell pepper to the mix.