As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to incorporate some lighter side dishes into my summer cooking as I’ve been trying to focus on more of a lean meat paired with vegetable sides based diet. This can be very hard as part of this project as so many of the recipes I come across are heavy and meat laden.

In planning for a Father’s Day weekend feast, I wanted to include a number of vegetarian based sides to accompany the chicken kebabs that have become a repeat player year around. You can find that recipe in my Turkey posting. But I digress. I decided to make this Fattoush salad after seeing a number of versions of the dish in my cookbooks and popping up on my Instagram feed. And let’s be honest, if I see a recipe from Ottolenghi, that is usually going to win out. The internet truly does read my mind. I elected to make a pretty simple version of this dish which did not include pomegranate molasses in the dressing as I was out of that). I loved the watermelon radishes I included along with the tomatoes, cucumber and fresh herbs. Add in some old naan and a buttermilk dressing sprinkled with sumac, and this was a wonderful side dish for a hot day.

Recipe I used: https://ottolenghi.co.uk/recipes/fattoush#

Overall Level of Effort: 1

Skill Level: Beginner

Would Make It Again? Yes

Additional Notes: Now that I’ve made this once it’s definitely the kind of dish that I can scale down and tweak as needed. This is an incredibly easy dish to make and the only time suck (which in the scheme of things is quite minor) is the chopping and peeling of the vegetables. If you’re looking for something a little different for a summer side, I highly recommend this dish.