I made this dish for lunch one day when I wanted something light but flavoursome. The rocket and basil were straight from our garden and the potatoes were leftovers, boiled the night before, so I just fried them up in some olive oil until they were nice and crispy.
The labne was actually a yoghurt-making exercise gone wrong. I was too impatient to wait for the milk to cool down before adding the culture, and so it curdled like cottage cheese. I continued with the process, leaving it overnight to “yoghurtise”. In the morning everything smelt and tasted right, but the consistency was still a curdled mess, so I decided to make labne instead. I added a teaspoon of salt, gave it a stir and tipped it into a muslin-lined strainer to separate the whey, letting it drain for a day in the fridge. I then rolled it up into balls, put it in a plastic container, along with some garlic cloves, rosemary and pepper corns and covered it with olive oil. After a couple of days the yoghurt balls had taken on the garlicky-rosemary flavour and became very addictive.
The first thing you might have noticed in this salad is the tomato. That wouldn’t surprise me. They are very red. Oecusse has the most wonderfully fresh and sweet tomatoes, as good as you would find in the most organic, gourmet, greengrocers (and, may I also add, about ten times better than the ones you get in Dili). And they are interesting: we can find pea-sized cherries as well as large heirlooms in all sorts of strange shapes, as well as traditional romas (which I used in this salad). And they are plentiful on a Saturday morning at the market. And they are cheap – around US$1 for a pile, which you can see in the photo, which is a picture of the market where I buy them from:
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