Fattoush is a Middle Eastern salad made using toasted or fried pieces of stale pitta bread, combined with a variety of vegetables.  Thank you to Sam and Sam Clark for this recipe from their beautiful ‘Moro: The Cookbook‘ – this is my ever-so-slight variation with the addition of fennel.

Serves 4
Preparation time: 30 minutes

Ingredients
1/2 large cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded and cut into 1cm dice
12 ripe cherry tomatoes, cut into quarters
1/2 medium cauliflower, broken into tiny florets roughly the same size as the tomato
1 spring onion, finely chopped
6 radishes cut into quarters
1 celery stick, finely chopped
Half small bulb of fennel, finely sliced and chopped
1 small bunch of fresh mint, coriander and flat-lead parsley, roughly chopped

Crispbread
2 pitta breads
1 tablespoon olive oil

Dressing
1 garlic clove, crushed to a paste with salt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 teaspoon of sumac
1 teaspoon of za’atar
5 tablespoons of olive oil
Sea salt and black pepper

To make the crispbread, preheat your oven to 180°C / 160°C fan assisted / gas mark 4.  Carefully split both the pitta bread in half lengthways and paint both sides with the olive oil (you can just use your hands if you don’t have a pastry brush).  Now place the pitta on a rack in the middle of the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes, or until the bread is golden brown.  Remove and cool.

Whilst you are baking the bread, you can prepare the dressing simply by combining all the ingredients.  Once the crispbread is cool, break up into bite-sized pieces around the same size as the vegetables.  Finally, make your salad by combining all the ingredients, including the morsels of crispbread, and drizzle over the dressing.  Toss everything together, taste for seasoning, and serve immediately.