How to Make a Lettuce Salad

We have our burik settling down and we have our rice almost cooked. Now one’s you see that most of the waters are soaked up, now it’s time to add in our delicious peas and our beautiful corn. We’re just going to close this up and it still needs to steam a little bit so I’m just going to give in a nice mixture and then put my paper towel and just let that steam up. So now I’m just going to turn it off and let that settle, now it’s time to make a delicious side salad.

Now you can make this side salad with any kind of greenery you want. Today, I picked the curly lettuce because I love it, because it’s crispy and really green in color and it’s going to go great with a little bit of carrot some tomato and you can make this salad on your own you can add black olives, you could add white canola beans, you could add shredded cabbage just totally make it your own and it’s going to go great with everything and the essential part of this salad is having the dressing.

Now most of the dressing and the Turkish cuisine is the same very healthy, very light with minimal variation. extra virgin olive oil , fresh lemon juice and salt and pepper and of course sometimes you can add a little garlic, sometimes you can add a little sumac and every now and again people add a little red vinegar to give it a little kick.

We’re going to add tomato, just a regular delicious red tomato but you could add red cherry tomatoes as well and you add cucumbers. And what’s great about tomatoes and cucumbers is traditionally in most Turkish homes, you’ll always find somebody growing in their backyard because we love growing our own vegetables and of course if we could we grow around fruit too. My mother in law in California, she’s always grown her own food, she has the freshest lemons, she has delicious tangerines, she even grows her own grape leaves, you know we love grape leaves because then we can make grape leaves the Dolma, the soft Dolma. So right now what I’m going to do I’m going to add just some shredded carrots for color and then make our dressing.

Now our dressing is very easy I already have one lemon freshly squeezed and I like it really sour, so if you didn’t want this match lemon you can definitely use half and for one lemon I like to use maybe 2 tablespoons of the extra virgin olive oil and of course just a little pinch of salt, mix it up all together and I always like to do it in a side dish because then it gets all around the salad evenly. And if you were doing this for guests, what you can do is prepare your salad, not put the dressing on it but put a paper towel over it, put in the fridge, this will keep your lettuce really light and crispy and the right before you’re about to serve then pour your dressing.

So that’s it so that’s how easy to side salad is and you can do this with anything you can do it with cabbage, you can do it for main lettuce and you can do it Arugula, or water crest anything you want. It’s very, very versatile and so delicious.