Cottage cheese chopped salad

With tomatoes, red onion, cucumber and parsley. This is somewhere between a Turkish, Persian and Greek salad. Either way it’s fresh and gorgeous.

This was a bit of a fridge raid salad but ended up being something I would definitely make again. It’s somewhere between a Persian salad (Sharazi), Turkish salad (Çoban salatası) and I guess a Greek salad too, although it uses cottage cheese rather than feta (feta would also work well as a substitute).

It’s very flexible based on whatever you have in the fridge/cupboard. Try adding diced pepper or olives, swap the parsley for mint, add pomegranate, and you can swap the balsamic for red wine vinegar or lemon. And if you don’t have sumac, really don’t worry.

This makes enough to serve two with some good bread, I enjoyed it with foccacia. Alternatively serve as a sharer salad and it will serve 4-6.

You’ll need:

• 250g cherry tomatoes, quartered

• 1/2 cucumber, diced

• 1/2 small/medium red onion

• Handful parsley, roughly chopped

• Handful rocket

• 2 tbsp balsamic glaze

• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

• 100g full fat cottage cheese

• Sumac (don’t worry if you don’t have it)

Mix everything apart from the cottage cheese and sumac in a bowl. Season well with salt and pepper. Leave to sit for a few minutes - the salt will help to draw the juices out of the tomatoes. Mix again.

Serve on a large serving plate and top with dollops of the cottage cheese, and sprinkle over a little sumac to finish.