©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipes©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipesWe're going right back to basics with this one. This must be one of the simplest recipes in the cookbook - it only has four ingredients and if you don't use salt, it's only three - but the resulting salad is very nice indeed.
This salad is as standard accompaniment to shashlyk, or kebabs, all over Uzbekistan. If you're a vegetarian travelling in that country, you might find yourself eating a lot of tomato and onion salad served with local flat bread. And that's not bad - not bad at all. The tomatoes in Uzbekistan (and in Kyrgyzstan and south Kazakhstan, where you also might come across this dish) are superb. I've been in a market in July, completely stuck for choice, because all the tomatoes I tried tasted different, but they were all so good I wanted to buy them.
So, I'm saying this is a great wee salad, but what I'm also saying is, as is generally the case with super simple recipes, the final result is going to depend very much on the quality of your ingredients. You don't need to get your tomatoes from Uzbekistan, but they should be firm and fresh, as should your onion. Limp tired vegetables make limp tired salads and there's nothing more disgusting.
You don't have to use olive oil - Uzbeks don't - but it will make a good salad. I sometimes do, but I most often use sunflower oil.
A couple tomatoes
A small onion
A drizzle of oil
A little salt
Cut the onion in half and slice the halves finely. Chop up the tomato and mix everything together.