The Silk Road Herb Salad

Posted by Nico & Gabi on Jul 16, 2014 in Our Travelling Kitchen | No Comments

Since we’ve been on the road we have shared some of the recipes that we have learnt on the way, the ones where we have cooked with people happy to open their homes and kitchens to us, a foray into local food along our journey.

We realise however that we have not shared the bulk of the other cooking we have been doing, the simple dishes we have made for ourselves on the road. Often they are an improvised mish mash of ingredients we find at the local bazaar and ingredients inspired by dishes we have tried in the country. Usually they only require our faithful Opinel knife and a bowl or when we are lucky enough to have a stovetop – a single frying pan or pot.

They are often relatively light as well, a break from the fat friendly dishes of Central Asia or more elaborate preparations of Iran and Greece. A way of upping our fruit and vegetable intake when a “plate of grilled vegetables” once meant a pile of burnt onions floating in oil in Montenegro.

Here in Samarkand, Uzbekistan is one of the rare times we have a nice plate and garden instead of a plastic bowl and bathroom sink to cook in. So we wanted to share with you one of our favourite salads that we have prepared numerous times in this region and have named “The Silk Road Herb Salad”. The salad itself is extremely basic and can be composed of any base vegetables you want really as long as they have crunch, but the real stars are the herbs.

We were inspired by the mountains of herbs we kept seeing at the bazaars here, particularly the indigo Thai Basil which is harder to come by at home and the fluffy bunches of spring green dill. This time we have used the herbs which we had on hand, though I can imagine it being flexible to other herbs as well. The only herb I would not add here is curly parsley as I think it would over power the delicate flavours of the other ones.

If you cannot find Thai Basil easily, I think it would work quite well replaced by a mixture of Italian Basil and some mint.

THE SILK ROAD HERB SALAD \ˌsɪlk rod ərb sæləd\

Serves 2 as a light lunch or 1 very hungry person for lunch

For the salad

2 mini cucumbers
2 small carrots
1 small pale green zucchini/courgette (do not use the big dark green zucchinis here as they are often too old to taste good raw)
1 tomato
1/2 cup Thai purple basil leaves
1/2 cup coriander leaves
3 spring onions

For the dressing

2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 tbsp of date vinegar
salt & black pepper to taste

This recipe gets its crunch from how you cut the vegetables, here I have sliced them as thinly as possible with our little travel knife, but if you have a peeler at home, it would work great on the zucchinis, cucumbers and carrots. I have also peeled all the vegetables to make sure they are clean, but if you trust your vegetable source at home, feel free to leave them unpeeled.

Cut the cucumbers in half and slice or vertically peel them so that they resemble 1cm by 4cm long stripes. Repeat with the carrots and the zucchini.

Cut the tomatoes into cubes or small slices and put everything into a bowl as you prepare the herbs.

Wash and dry the herbs well, you can use a towel to pat them dry, or if you have a salad spinner at home, even better. Remove the leaves from the Thais basil and discard the tough stalks. Repeat for the coriander. Chop the spring onions finely and discard any of the old green tips.

Then simply mix in a bowl and add the olive oil, date vinegar and salt and black pepper to your taste. If you cannot find date vinegar, you could replace it with your favourite balsamico, but I urge you to track it down in a speciality store (middle eastern ones should stock it), it will be worth it.