Marge, Homer and Bart conga-lining around the house singing, “You don’t make friends with salad,” to an unimpressed Lisa, a vegetarian, might have aired in 1995 (1995!), but it’s still an excellent scene from The Simpsons. It is completely untrue, of course. Case in point: our guide to barbeque-enhancing salad recipes is a friend-making list if ever we saw one.
This is another for making friends. It comes from the latest cookbook by Melbourne’s Very Good Falafel, a Brunswick eatery where Shuki Rosenboim and Louisa Allan make some of the city’s best falafel, alongside many vegan Middle Eastern salads, dips and soft pide. Very Good Salads includes 52 salad recipes as well as dips – and, for the first time, Rosenboim and Allan have also shared the recipe for their excellent falafel.
This salad recipe has only eight ingredients, but each adds a different dimension. You get crunch from the celery, radishes and broad beans, and freshness from the mint. Lemon adds zest, the spring onions some bite, and salt helps balance it all out.
“Fresh, crunchy and colourful, with the broad beans reminding us of their short-but-sweet season,” the recipe intro says. That season is now, so this is a perfect salad to add to your lunch repertoire or help offset all the heavy eating leading into Christmas. (You can of course swap the broad beans out for another crunchy green bean if you can’t find it).
Shuki Rosenboim and Louisa Allan’s celery, radish, mint, broad beans and spring onion salad
Serves 4
Prep time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:
400g broad beans
½ bunch of celery, cut into 5mm thick slices on the diagonal
5–6 radishes, cut into thin wedges
2 handfuls of mint leaves
4 spring onions (scallions), thinly sliced
100ml extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
Sea salt flakes
Method:
Pod the broad beans, then peel them. This is easier if you give them a quick soak in hot water first.
Place the beans, celery, radish, mint leaves and spring onion in a bowl. Drizzle over the olive oil and lemon juice, scatter with sea salt and toss gently to combine.
Serve immediately.
This is an edited extract from Very Good Salads, by Shuki Rosenboim and Louisa Allan, published by Smith Street Books, distributed by Thames & Hudson Australia, $39.99. Buy it here.
Looking for more recipe inspiration? Check out Broadsheet’s recipe hub.
