Bulgur Wheat. What's That?

I made bulgur wheat pilaf the other night. I have to say that I didn’t even know what bulgur wheat was until a few weeks ago. But that’s what friends are for – to introduce you to new foods. My friend who’s a vegetarian wanted to bring something fresh and flavorful to a recent potluck party and opened up a vegan cookbook for us to consider our options. Believe it or not, the recipe we chose was one of the simpler ones in the book. But bulgur wheat was not in the local supermarket so we trekked to a special organic store to pick it up. We found that it wasn’t so easy to cook, either; the bulgur wheat remained hard even after we cooked it for the amount of time specified by the recipe.  So we kept cooking it. Finally it looked ready to eat. We did a quick taste test, and it was delicious! What surprised me most was all the meat-lovers at the party raving about the dish, too.

Fast forward to this week. I wanted to make the bulgur wheat dish myself to see if I came out as well as our initial concoction. This time, I changed the ratio of water to bulgur, doubled the recipe and added a little bit more lemon zest. The end result? It came out even better! I think the additional water was what really did the trick.

Chickpea and Bulgur Pilaf

Serve as a side dish or stuff in a pita

Start to finish 40 minutes, makes 4 servings as a side dish

1 cup uncooked bulgur or cracked wheat

(or any other leftover whole grain you have)

2 cups boiling water

1 cup diced tomato (seeds and juice discarded)

1 cup chopped scallions

1/2 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

1 teaspoon chopped fresh basil

16 oz can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 1/2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/4 cup lemon juice

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Place the bulgur in a large bowl. Add boiling water and stir to mix. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand 30 minutes.

Combine the tomato, scallions, parsley, basil and chickpeas in a medium bowl. Toss well, then add to bulgur and stir to mix.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the zest, juice, oil, salt and pepper.  Add mixture to bulgur and toss well.  Let stand 10 minutes before serving.