Preparing Israeli Vegetable Salad

We spent the first half hour of Tuesday's and Wednesday's sessions this past week up in the Oneg Room with Karen (on Tuesday) and Stephanie (on Wednesday), preparing a very colorful and tasty Israeli vegetable salad with the other 5th and 6th grade students. This was the last of the 8 cooking sessions scheduled for this school year.

This coming Monday evening and all day Tuesday we'll be celebrating the State of Israel's 69th birthday - Yom Ha'atzma'oot (Independence Day), and what better way to begin our celebrations than by preparing one of the most ubiquitous of recipes in Israel today. A big bowl of this salad can be found on almost every Israeli kitchen counter or table, since it's eaten for breakfast, lunch, and sometimes even dinner in combination with eggs and dairy products such as cheeses, yogurt and sour cream. It makes a perfect snack food on its own as well - light, delicious and filled with nutrients.

The basic recipe is made of diced cucumbers (English and Persian cucumbers work best since they have few seeds and the seeds are much smaller than in our thick-skinned American cucumbers), diced Roma tomatoes, bell peppers and scallions. Many Israelis also add in minced mint and parsley leaves. If you use any dressing at all, a lemon juice/olive oil dressing with salt and black pepper to taste is best - just enough dressing to drizzle lightly on the vegetables immediately before eating the salad.

Obviously, most of the salad preparation in the Oneg Room this past week involved slicing, chopping and dicing, and the students became very adept at both by the time they had completed the process. 

Jack and Gabe are busy slicing cucumbers and scallions. Did you know that the word "scallion" is derived from the Israeli port city of Ashkelon?

Callen is developing quite a knack here for slicing the peppers.

There were also yellow peppers to slice, which Gabby is doing here (with Rona busy dicing the cucumber)

Alexia developed her own technique for the English cucumbers - first slice, then dice!

Michael preferred his Persian cucumbers to be sliced thickly.

The bowl is starting to fill up and looks so colorful!

Once the vegetables were all chopped, sliced and diced, it was time to go up to the main table to get the parsley leaves, salt and other salad dressing ingredients.

Finally, the salad is ready.

Time to dig in and put as much as you wanted to eat into a paper bowl.

Then join everyone else at the tables to enjoy the "fruits" of your labor.

TA's and teachers also had a moment to enjoy every tasty bite!

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Karen and Stephanie for all the effort they each put into making all 8 cooking sessions so successful. It meant buying the ingredients, setting up the Oneg Room so that everything was ready to start preparing the recipe as soon as teachers and students came into the Room, baking the pastry recipes, dividing them up into plastic bags to hand out to the students at the end of the session, and, of course, cleaning up. YASHER KO'ACH to you both!

I'm looking forward to seeing those fifth grade families on Sunday morning, who signed up to visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco for a tour and art project relating to the exhibit of Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs. Meanwhile, our sixth grade families will be meeting on Sunday morning, first session only, in the Social Hall for the final B'nai Mitzvah Prep workshop of the year.

YOM HA'ATZMA'OOT SAMEACH! HAPPY ISRAEL INDEPENDENCE DAY (#69)!