Thursday, May 19, 2011

Fattoush Salad

One of my current favorite salads is at a place called "Blue Barn" on Chestnut Street, in the Marina District of San Francisco. It is called a Fattoush, which is essentially a bread salad, Arabic style. You know, a way to use up stale pita bread, the way the Italians do with their old bread in Panzanella. Blue Barn uses romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, red onions, scallions, chickpeas, nicoise olives, feta, mixed herbs and crispy pitas, with a champagne-sumac vinaigrette. I crave it regularly.

Well, I had a hankering for this salad the other day and tried to remember what went inside, and threw this together. It was so tasty. Here is the picture of my leftovers the next day when, unfortunately, the pita chips were all gone already. It was still really good, though!


The ingredients were:
Romaine lettuce
Halved grape tomatoes
Chopped Kalamata olives
Chickpeas
Crumbled feta
Sliced cucumbers
Sliced red onions
Roughly chopped parsley
Balsamic vinaigrette
Broken pita chips (be generous!)

I used amounts that just looked right to me. You definitely want the vegetables to be present in every bite. This is not a mostly-lettuce type dish.


Do you have a favorite salad? Please share! 'Tis the season with all this great spring and summer produce aplenty!