Freekeh Salad with Orange and Apricot Super-Healthy

Name: Freekeh Salad with Orange and Apricot *Super-Healthy*
Yield: A Vegan Side Salad for 6
Cuisine: Egypt
Ingredients: 175 ml/6 fl oz/¾ cup vegetable stock; 75 ml/2½ fl oz/5 tbsp orange juice; ½ tsp chilli (red pepper) flakes; 100 g/3½ oz/⅔ cup macadamia halves, toasted (do use other nuts if you like); 100 g/3½ oz. generous ½ cup dried apricots (preferably organic), soaked for 30 minutes in cold water; 150 g/5½ oz.freekeh (if you can’t find any, buckwheat or barley will do fine); 5 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil; 2½ tbsp apple (or cider) vinegar; sea salt and freshly ground black pepper; ½ bunch of fresh mint, shredded; ½ tsp cumin seeds; 1 tbsp pomegranate seeds (optional); 1 onion, chopped; 1 bunch of fresh chives, chopped; 1 bunch of fresh coriander (cilantro), chopped; 2 sticks of celery, chopped; non-extra-virgin olive oil, for frying; 30 g/1 oz.sour orange peel (available dried in Middle Eastern stores: grated Seville or ordinary orange zest will do at a pinch); 1 tsp fennel seeds; 1 tsp rose petals; 1 tsp.cracked coriander seeds

Preparation info

A Vegan Side Salad for
6

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Salmagundi

By Sally Butcher

Published 2014

About

Freekeh is smoked wheat. It has been a part of the diet in the Levant and Egypt for millennia, and even gets a mention in medieval Baghdad texts. Young green wheat is sun-dried and then torched. Because there is so much sap inside the wheat, only the chaff burns off, leaving the inner kernel roasted but intact. The wheat is then rubbed and thrashed, and left in the sun a little more: it is either packed whole or cracked so that it resembles coarse bulghur wheat. It is now being touted as a