 Hello everyone, I am your produce guy. Summertime calls for salads, especially when we've got so many great fresh vegetables that we can use in them. What I'm going to make for you today is called tabooly salad, or some people refer to it as parsley salad. A friend of mine, good friend of mine, in California of Middle Eastern descent, he taught me how to make this salad. And it is made with fresh vegetables, some lemon juice, and bulgar wheat. I have to give you a little explanation on what bulgar wheat is. That is some chopped up wheat that's been parboiled, so it's partially cooked. So we don't have to cook it for our meal or our salad here today. We're just going to soak it in the lemon juice. So I've got, here's my recipe, I've got one cup of the bulgar wheat. You put that in a big bowl because all this stuff is going to go in there. Next step, I take two lemons. My friend used just one lemon, but I like the extra lemon juice in here. It gives it a tart tangy taste, that good citrusy taste that brightens the whole salad up. I'm just squeezing these in here by hand. Let me get both of them going. Now once I've got the lemon juice in here, we need enough liquid in this bowl to cover the wheat, because it's going to have to set aside and soak. It takes about 35, 40, maybe 45 minutes to soak up all this liquid. So what we have to do, my lemon juice is not quite covered my wheat. So I'm going to add a little bit of water. We're just going to get this, I'm going to see it in here. There we go. We're going to cover it with water and let it set and work on the rest of our vegetables. Now that we've got our bulgar wheat soaking away over there, next ingredient is going to be tomatoes. Now we're going to chop these tomatoes. Normally, you'd want to use Roma tomatoes in this, but I've got some fresh tomatoes out of the garden here. They will offer us a little more juice than perhaps a Roma tomato, which is a little bit drier. So what we would do, if we were making salsa with these, we would strain these tomatoes to get some of the juice out of there, so it's not so watery. But because that bulgar wheat is soaking up the lemon juice and the water over there, I'm going to go ahead and add these tomatoes right to the bulgar wheat and let the wheat soak up the tomato juice. So add a little more flavor to that. Now I've got tomatoes through those into the bulgur wheat and now I've got some cucumbers. Now these guys right here, these are English style cucumbers, mini cucumbers. You can eat the skin. The skin is nice and edible and that will wax up or anything. You can use a regular cucumber, if you like, but I prefer these when they're available and they are going to add just a wonderful crunch to our salad. So let me get these chopped up here. Now when I made this salad with my friend in California this last summer, he did this stuff up in his food processor. But you don't have to have a food processor to get this done. It might take a few minutes longer, but that's all right. There's nothing wrong with spending a few minutes in the kitchen with these fresh ingredients and getting them ready. I'm starting to have my mouth water here. Just thinking about the finished product. There, we've got a good batch of chopped cucumbers. They're ready to go. That'll add a nice crunch to the salad. Okay, next up is our red onion. Depending on how much you like red onion, that'll determine how much you want to put into the salad. So I think we're going to put about three quarters of this. That's about, think about right for this batch. Now time for our parsley. This recipe calls for two bunches of parsley. Now I prefer the flat leaf Italian parsley. You can use the curly leaf parsley, but I think this has a much more pleasing flavor. And we're just going to go right down the line here. Get that chopped up. There we go. All right, I've got the preparations all complete. We've let our bulgar wheat soak here for a bit. It is, I fluffed it up a little bit through the tomatoes in there so that tomato juice is working into the wheat. So we've got two tomatoes. I use two of those small tomatoes. I use three of those small cucumbers. The beauty of this recipe is you can adjust it however you want. You can add things to it, take things out. Peppers would be wonderful in here. We're going to get those three cucumbers in there. Now I chopped up that whole red onion, but that looks like way too much red onion for me. So I'm only going to put about half of that red onion in there. You can always add more later, hard to get it out once it's in there. There we go. About half of red onion. And then my two bunches of parsley, other than the stems here, two bunches of parsley, and all that goes in. The bowl is starting to fill up now. All right. We're going to give that a stir, and we're almost ready. And now we add just a little bit of olive oil, just enough to make everything kind of shine. So maybe a teaspoon or so, about like that. A teaspoon and a half. So when there you know I love olive oil, we'll get that stirred up. Touch of salt, freshly ground pepper, and this is done. There's a close up of that salad, doesn't that look gorgeous? Oh, and it's delicious. Now let's have a try. Mmm. Oh. Terrific. The wheat is soaked up that citrus. Oh, full of flavor. The cucumbers are crispy, just enough onion. That is terrific. We're going to put this in the fridge, let it chill. This is part of tonight's dinner. Wonderful. Well, I've been pleased to be able to show you and share with you one of my favorite summertime salads. No meat, all vegetables good for my vegetarian and vegan friends. You guys will love this. Full of flavor, it is wonderful. You can always throw in, as I mentioned, peppers or maybe a little pepper flake to spice it up, if that's what you'd like. But this is a nice cooling salad. Great for summertime, great for anytime. Thanks for watching. So happy that you're with us. Hope you've enjoyed this one and our other episodes. Check those out. We will be seeing you again soon with our next episode. And as always, remember, fresh is best. We'll see you next time.