Zucchini, Broad Bean and Freekeh Salad

You can never have enough salads in your repertoire and Julie is here to show us one from her new book. Oh I love your new book. I love all your books. I have them all. I actually have doubles of some of them. I don't know, I think I buy them to make sure I've got an extra copy for friends because I love sharing your recipes. They're that delicious. Even a simple salad you managed to make just scrumptious. What are we working with today? We are cooking a beautiful salad for springtime. It's grilled zucchini with broad beans, frica, some beautiful buttery almonds and it's really quite simple. You're like me, follow the seasons because it just makes cooking simpler. Exactly. So we're really highlighting these beautiful spring zucchini and you can use smaller ones if you've got them with the zucchini flowers as well. It's really beautiful. I'm just going to start on these so chopping them up and I'm going to grill them in a pan with just olive oil and I might get you to start on the shallots, the French shallots. So the basis is frica but we've also got some French shallots in there, some beautiful broad beans and you know if you can't get fresh broad beans the frozen ones are actually really good. I love this recipe because a lot of the things here I can see are interchangeable. If you don't have broad beans you could use fresh spring peas for this. Yeah you could use peas. If you don't have frica you can use pearl barley, you could do brown rice. I'm just going to do one more. And so you're cutting them in chunks, not too small? Yeah not too small because we want to be able to see and taste that beautiful zucchini. Yeah. So how do you come up with all these recipes for your many books? This one is number four. Number four. So this one is called Good Cooking Every Day and really the inspiration for this one was about how to help people cook beautiful food every single day. So that's kind of how it evolved. There's menus in this book and so I often find people maybe struggle to know what to put with what so it's kind of a little bit of a and help in that area as well. Very helpful. All right so we're just going to cook the zucchini. So a beautiful extra virgin olive oil. All right so the pan's hot and I've got my olive oil in and we're just going to start frying these zucchini and we want them to get a nice amount of colour on them and we're just going to season them and cook them until they're looking nice and well coloured. Very nice. Lovely colour on these. I know they look really really gorgeous. So they can just cool down for a few minutes while we start adding the rest of our ingredients. So we've got herbs, some frica which I've just cooked. I've just boiled it in a saucepan until they were al dente. I love frica, it's got this almost chewiness to it. It's quite nutty isn't it? And then I'm just working on the little garnish. So I'm just going to melt some butter and I've got some slivered almonds here which are just going to colour up really nicely and we're going to top the salad. So the butter's ready, it's foaming. I'm just going to pop these almonds into the pan and then over here we've also put some lemon juice into those shallots to kind of take away that strength of the shallots and also cut through the richness of the dish. Such a great idea. Very nice. And then we can just pop everything else in. So we've got the herbs which are really fragrant. I love this soup. I love it. The whole lot or just about half a teaspoon? Half a teaspoon. So a good pinch and that is also a kind of lemony hit. So it's a really lemony spice. And broad beans. Broad beans are my two favourite ingredients. I'm actually going to take this off the heat. They're that quick. Just going to let that sit for a minute to cool down ever so slightly and then the broad beans go in and if you've got really small ones, I've kept some un-potted here, they don't even need to be potted. They're really sweet. It's when they're really big like this that you kind of want to peel out that outer pod just to reveal the tender little broad bean inside. And it's so easy to peel as you defrost them. Exactly. In it goes. Amazing. Shall I give that a mix? Yeah, give it a good toss and we can just kind of assemble it onto this plate. So it's really quite simple. I will season it. Can't forget our seasoning. No way. We love our salt. Amazing. And I can just imagine this, you know, on a spring afternoon outside. And you were grilling these in a pan but there's no reason why you can't light the barbecue, grill them on there for an extra smoky flavour. Exactly. And this is a perfect kind of salad if you're having a barbecue. Yeah. Also, I love this just as it is for lunch. You know, you could even have a dollop of yoghurt on the side. Or our favourite a bit is buffalo mozzarella. I do love buffalo mozzarella. That is a real favourite. Love the colours. And then I'm going to, I might grab another spoon, Josie, actually. Thank you. More is more. Yep. Just going to spoon some of this beautiful golden, buttered, toasted almonds over the top. Just for that crunch, that kind of richness. And that's our salad done. She's very good. Shall we have a taste? Let's have a taste. I really want to get the nuts. Yeah, and the mint and the dill. And just everything works in harmony together. Perfectly seasoned. I've got to have another taste. It's that good. I'm happy with this. Simple salads will always be delicious, particularly when you do them in the season. And right here, we're talking about spring. That's spring on the plate from Julia.