Salad Shirazi

My part Iranian heritage means that I have a natural leaning towards Middle eastern foods and flavours, and find most foods, but particularly salads, can be more than a bit enhanced by generous lashings of lemon and mint.

This salad takes literally minutes to throw together, has a dressing so simple that it can barely be called a dressing, will keep for ages in the fridge, has hardly any calories or carbs and is absolutely delicious! In short, it's a favourite and it makes an appearance on the table at least 3 times a week. You can play around with the ingredients to use up whatever you have hanging around, but I usually keep to tomato, cucumber and onion and then add other bits and pieces to this combination.

The only slightly annoying thing about the salad is that it requires all the ingredients to be cut up very finely which can be time consuming if your knife skills are at all lacking- as mine are- but you can just as easily do it in a food processor which takes actually no time at all, though will produce a slightly less instagram worthy appearance!


You will need (serves 2):

• Half a cucumber
• 2 salad tomatoes, or a good handful of cherry tomatoes
• One red onion
• A handful of finely chopped mint
• A good glug of olive oil- subjective I know but it is a personal preference sort of thing- I don't use much
• The juice of one large lemon, or about 20ml lemon juice

Making it is so easy:

• Finely chop all the vegetables and add to a large bowl
• Pour your olive oil and lemon juice over it
• Add the chopped mint, you can even use a couple of teaspoonfuls of mint sauce to save time
• Mix it all together well
• Enjoy, and thank me later!

*By the way- this salad isn't remotely my recipe at all, this is just how I make it, which I think is more or less the same way as most people make it. It's a staple in middle Eastern cooking in the same way that  Greek salad, or Russian salad is.*

Like I said, make lots as it keeps so well then pop the rest in a sandwich box for tomorrows lunch!

Once you get into it, you can add other bits and pieces you find in the fridge- here I added peppers and spring onions. You can also present the vegetables all separately in pizza style slices!

You can see for this one, I got a bit lazy with the tomato cutting and some of the pieces are not exactly finely chopped. I also added greek basil to this one, as I was running low on mint, and garnished with some cornflower petals that I had knocking around!