Falafel and Roasted Sweet Potato Salad (AKA Jackson Pollock Salad) Tasty? Yes! Healthy? Kinda! This is pretty easy to make, and as healthy as you want it to be. If you want a cleaner salad, just forget the cheese. Most of this recipe is roasting the potatoes, prepping the rest of the ingredients, then assembling it Jackson Pollock style. Goes well with white wine, if you have any. ------------------------------- Ingredients Falafel pack Sweet potato (one is fine) Salad (rocket works well, but a 100g bag of anything works) Red pepper Cucumber Olives (garlic ones if they’ve got them) Quinoa Cheese (I use blue cheese, but feta will work well too) Coriander powder (if they’ve got it, but not essential) Cornflower (useful, not essential) Cinnamon (tiny bit, if you’ve got it) Olive oil Balsamic vinegar Balsamic glaze (they usually sell these in the salad section, or make your own if you like. Just add some sugar to balsamic vinegar, heat in a pan until it gets sticky. Done) Yogurt Almond flakes (to be honest, just grab any of those salad dressing packs the supermarket tends to have. If they don’t have them, they usually have little bags of almond flakes) ----------------------- Cooking tools you’ll need are in bold Recipe - Turn the oven on to 200, fan if you’ve got a fan oven. No worries if not. - Peel and chop the sweet potato into sorta wedge shaped chunks. Grab a mixing bowl. Pour some olive oil in, a good chug of it (we need enough to cover the surface area of the potatoes) and then about a teaspoon of cornflower. Now add some coriander power (a decent amount) and salt and pepper. Mix it all together. The cornflower will make this stick to the potatoes, and make them crispy. Chuck the potatoes we cut up into the mixing bowl and shake it all up until the potatoes are properly covered in the mixture. - Grab a roasting tray. Put the potatoes in it, then put the roasting tray in the hot oven. Ok, timing on this varies - for me, it’s around 50 minutes. Either way, eep an eye on them, move them around every 20 mins or so, and keep them in the oven until they start to get crispy. When they start to burn at the tips, they’re done. - Time to chop up most of the ingredients. Grab a chopping board and your best, sharpest knife. Dice about a quarter of a cucumber into tiny bits. Put to one side. Get about half a red pepper and dice that too. Put to one side. Cut the olives into bits, put to one side. All of this is gonna go in a big bowl later. - Fry the diced red pepper in a frying pan for a few minutes. You won’t need oil in the pan as rep peppers have a lot of moisture in them already. Fry for a bit (seriously, like a minute or so is enough) and then put to one side. - Grab a big bowl , like a salad bowl if you’ve got one but any big... bowl-shaped thing, I guess, is fine. I used a saucepan once, although I don’t recommend that. Anyway: bowl. Get one, and put the rep peppers, cucumber and olives in it. Once you’ve done that, put the salad in the bowl with it. - Time to make the dressing. Get another bowl (I hope you have a dishwasher for all these bowls we are using) and put some olive oil and balsamic vinegar in it. Approx 2 tablespoons of olive oil to around one teaspoon of vinegar. Add salt and pepper, then whisk it all together. Put to one side. - Ok, we’ve done most of the work now. Check the potatoes and give them a bit of shuffle. Next we are going to sort out the quinoa. Get a saucepan full of water get it boiling. Once it’s boiling, dump around 100g of quinoa in it. Boil it for whatever the quinoa pack advises - mine is like, 8 mins or so? It’s easy stuff. After that time, pour it out and catch the quinoa in a sieve. Leave it there to cool, we want it room temp for the salad. - If you’re using cheese, get it out of the fridge around now, so it’ll be room temperature when we serve it. - Let’s prep the falafel for the oven. Get another roasting tray or just line a rack with oven paper. All we really need is the falafel to have a very light coating of olive oil on it. Just drizzle a tiny bit on and shake the falafel about so that they are coated. That’s it. Put them to one side. - Now we kinda just wait. Good time to have a glass of wine, I reckon. Consider it part of the recipe. Keep one eye on the potatoes. - Once the potatoes are nearly done, put the falafel in the oven with them. Falafel tends to only need a few minutes. Once the falafel is done, turn the oven off. Get the oven trays out and put them somewhere safe. If you can’t do that, just leave them in the oven with the door open or something. - Shake the potatoes out onto a chopping board or a plate or something flat (no, not the floor). We just need them to sit here for a few minutes and cool off a bit. - Ok, time for the super fun bit - Get out two plates and put to one side. Now, we’ve still got the bowl full of the salad and all the other stuff, yeah? Dump the quinoa in the bowl with it. Give your salad dressing a quick whisk then dump that in there too. Now, get your hands in there. Yeah, that’s right, your bare hands. Get them in there and mix it all up. No, more than that. Ok, that’s good. Now, take handfuls of the salad and scatter it across those two plates. Some of the salad will have collected at the bottom of the bowl. Be sure to grab those bits (usually pepper and cucumber) and scatter them on the plates too. - Now, with tongs (or hands, if you’re feeling brave) put the bits of potato and the falafel pieces across, on and around the salad. Tap into your artistic side. Arrange them nicely. Pretend you’re on a fancy cooking show. If you’re adding cheese, bust it up into pieces and scatter it over the salad at this point. - Done? Nice. Now, get some of that yogurt out of the fridge. Get a teaspoon (or any spoon to be honest) of the stuff. Now, sort of... flick the spoon at the salad, from above. Jackson Pollock style. You’ll sort of fleck sprays of yogurt over the salad. Do around... five spoons worth, or so? - Now, the balsamic glaze. Hold it over the salad at a bit of a height and just go nuts. Swing it around, don’t worry if a bit goes over the side of the plate. You’re a fancy artist now, they’re gonna put this thing in the Louvre. If you look up, you’ll notice you’re wearing a beret now. - Looking great. Ok, last thing. Those almond flakes, or whatever salad topping you have, scatter those on top. - That’s it! Serve, enjoy. And don’t worry, that balsamic glaze will wash right off the kitchen counter. --------------------------------------------------------