Meal 97: Libya

After nearly four years, we've finally hit halfway! And how fitting to celebrate with a cuisine that's a synthesis of several influences. Libya is a real culinary interface between Africa and the Mediterranean: stews over a ball of pounded dough definitely evoke many of the sub-Saharan meals we've had so far, while spice-heavy preparations of lamb have the influence of the Ottoman Empire all over them. There's even a little legacy of the Italian occupation. For being a cuisine you hear very little about, it was really, really good — and little known, to the extent that I could find only one site with more than a few Libyan recipes. (Though it was a great site that provided all the recipes!)

To mark the occasion, we decided to make a bigger occasion out of it, and the stars aligned — our local Whole Foods donated the food and connected us to the Oregon Culinary Institute, which provided a beautiful space and a chef and several students to make it all happen. Huge thanks to Leora at Whole Foods, and to Tera, Chef Maxine, and all the students who chopped, stirred, and (blessedly) cleaned for fifty people. I fret that the leftovers they took home was scant compensation for so many hours of work! They're in the far back of the photo here, but they deserve to be front and center!

We passed one more milestone on this meal, crossing $25,000 in fundraising for charities addressing hunger around the world. For this one meal, we split the proceeds between Mercy Corps and Whole Planet Fountation — if you shopped at Whole Foods in March, you may still have one of those fetching purple-printed bags explaining how their microloans help families around the world.

Mseyer | Quick pickles | Recipe

Simple to throw together, just cut some veggies into matchsticks and mix with a brine with the right balance of hot peppers. It's a vibrant texture and color contrast to the rest of the meal. Or you can do as we did, and just nibble on them as an appetizer.

Bazeen | Recipes: Dough and lamb stew; tomato soup

This dish centers around a lump of dough made mostly of barley. It's one of the stranger techniques I've seen, where you dump a whole lot of flour in a little bit of salted water but don't mix it for 45 minutes. The outside of course gets wet but the inside is dry. Then you mix it all up — thankfully, a stand mixer works great, otherwise it'd be a ton of tough stirring — and amazingly it all comes together into a mass that can be made into balls. This means of preparing starch is attributed to the Berbers, but its popularity has spread.

What's far tastier, to me and apparently most of the guests, is the stew that goes on top. The primary choice was a lamb stew with spices like turmeric and fenugreek with potato chunks and a little tomato sauce to redden it up. Nothing particularly fancy or more exotic than what you can find in a supermarket, but it was well-balanced and rich, a real crowd pleaser. For a vegetarian stew, I found a lovely soup of tomato with herbs like mint and basil, and followed a hunch from another recipe and used dried fava beans — no soaking, boiled on their own, then added to the soup — which turned out amazingly well. The flavor was more delicate, as you'd imagine with fresh herbs, and surprisingly full for a vegetarian sauce. (Check out the quantities we were cooking in!)

Due to serving logistics, we only had small cup-size soup bowls, so it was essentially impossible to eat the dough with the stew on top as would be traditional. If you're making this, you'll want to make an effort to get bigger stew bowls, or better yet serve it all in an enormous platter to be eaten directly with the hands.

Note that I anguished over whether to make a shorba libiya, the oft-proclaimed national dish, but in the end I figured it's pretty similar to the lamb stew that went with the bazeen, and the bazeen's so distinctive that I just had to do it!

Makaruna imbaukha | Steamed pasta with pumpkin and raisins | Recipe

Couscous is traditionally made by steaming over the sauce with which it is to be served. But who knew you could prepare Italian-style pasta the same way? (Confession: due to issues of timing and logistics we ended up boiling the pasta the normal way, but I'd like to try it the traditional way someday!)

The sauce is also really intriguing. Not only are the base ingredients a sweet-savory blend of chickpeas, pumpkin, and raisins plus generous bay leaves, but the spices really take it over the top, with a generous dose of cinnamon, ground ginger, butter, and rosewater right before serving. I'm pretty sure nobody in the room had had pasta with quite that variety of seasonings before! The reviews were a bit mixed: some people were thrown for a loop by flavors they traditionally associate with dessert, while others found it intriguing and compelling.

Mbattan kusha | Potato and ground lamb casserole | Recipe

The more common, and certainly more distinctive, version of mbattan involves cutting a big notch out of a potato, stuffing it with seasoned meat, and deep-frying it. While that would have been fun, it would have been too complicated to pull off for serving to several dozen people at once, even in a commercial kitchen. So instead, we went with a deconstructed, oven-baked variant with layers of pre-roasted potato slices sandwiching a very ample ground-lamb filling. While this was probably the least exotic dish of the evening, it was perhaps the most popular, and rightly so: a great contrast of crunchy potato with soft meat, and a nicely balanced seasoning throughout.

Harissa | Spicy sauce | Recipe

I didn't realize, until I tried to find them, that fresh red chili peppers are only available seasonally. Nowhere in town had them! So I went to my standby Asian market up on Killingsworth for two packages of frozen Thai peppers. (This coming summer I'll make a point of freezing the best red peppers I can find!)

Finding the peppers was the second-hardest part; the hardest was making sure not to get any bit of it in my eyes! Once I accomplished those two, it was as simple as a little chopping of the ancillary ingredients, a blender, and a bit of time on the stove. I thought I'd made too much, but it turns out I underprepared, because every last bit was gone before the meal was over.

Basbousa bil tamr | Semolina cake with date filling | Recipe

The general technique for making cakes in the Middle East and the kitchens it's influenced is quite a bit foreign to my Eurocentric sensibilities. Whereas the cakes I know tend to be fluffy with the sugar baked in, these cakes are instead dense and fairly unsweet until they're doused with syrup after baking. (That's why baklava's so darn sticky.) In fact, this batter, based around semolina and coconut, was so thick that I pressed rather than pouring it into the pan. It was also a challenge to put together, since there's a layer of date paste sandwiched between two layers of that semolina-coconut dough. (Protip: try rolling out the date paste between waxed paper or saran wrap, it'd be a whole lot messy than pressing sections between your hands like I did!) The baking went fine, though the cake was positively swimming in syrup and we had to pour much of it off, so you can safely make quite a bit less than the recipe calls for.

I found it pretty tasty, but I've grown to like this type of dense, cloying treat. It went really well with the recommended qashta cream — if you can find it it'll probably be in a can with the Puck brand name, but World Foods in Portland happens to carry a fresh version that goes under a name that escapes me but is a heavenly rich, medium-tangy accompaniment.

Thanks once again to Whole Foods and everyone at Oregon Culinary Institute. This was a really special evening, a fittingly collaborative way to celebrate going halfway around the world, one feast at a time!

Meal 96: Liberia

This little slice of West Africa, internationally infamous for its brutal civil war and more recent Ebola crisis, has an unique origin story: it was founded by freed slaves who returned from the US.  (Note: A Liberian comments that this is the wrong way to portray it. To clarify I should say that the nation in its current political form was founded by those free slaves; indeed there were many people living there prior.) From what I can tell most of the cuisine is based on the locally available foods — which, unlike most of the rest of Africa but similarly to its immediate neighbors, is based on rice as a staple — but there are hints of the American legacy, particularly in the desserts.

Thanks to Jeff, Mark, and Heather, all folks who've worked in Liberia, for advice that translated directly into my choice of dishes. (Sorry none of you could make it!) And to Mama Pauline's, the African market that's a short bike ride away, for having everything I needed and plenty of friendly advice!

This was our first-ever meal where we didn't know any of the guests, and it was a great success! We met an astrophysicist, a Portland Police detective, and a caterer from Hood River, among other fascinating characters. Thanks to Jia, Daniel, Katie, Mary, Dave, Courtney, Emily, Brynden, Bonni, and Geo for coming, and for donating generously!

Kanyah | Peanut snack | Recipe

A really simple treat made from just peanuts, rice, and sugar. To avoid turning it into peanut butter, I crushed the peanuts by hand in my big mortar and pestle, which was easy enough. (You could use a Ziploc and a rolling pin to similar effect.) But crushing toasted rice grains by hand was getting mighty tedious, so I just threw them into the food processor. The resulting mix of the three ingredients is like slightly wet sand and hence quite crumbly; I used a measuring cup to create the forms. It’s reminiscent of halva or those other crumbly sweets from the heart of the Near East.

Palm butter | Recipe and some advice

The rich sauce extracted from palm nuts can be found all along the coast of West Africa, and it’s typically prepared in the same way, as a stew. When we’ve cooked this dish for other countries, it has one type of meat, if any at all. But Liberians seem to revel in tossing in whatever treasures of land and sea they manage to come across, hence why the recipe calls for [[CRAB??]], shrimp, chicken, beef, and smoked turkey. (Of course if you don’t have them all on hand, just use what you’ve got!) Given that these palms are native to this part of the continent, it’s little wonder that this is considered a very important dish, one that a woman is traditionally expected to be able to make before she’s considered marriageable.

I messed up in one big way. As the name implies, this dish is supposed to be cooked down until it’s thick and rich. But I started with a bunch of water to boil the meats, and then added more to thin the palm sauce, and even after an hour and a half of boiling it was too thin. Alas, it was time to eat, so we ended up with more of a soup. It was definitely tasty (though I found the shrimp to be quite overcooked — my preference would have been to add them at the very end!), but if you’re going to make this, make sure to err on the side of less water as you can always add more. Alas, doesn’t look like I’m quite cut out to be a Liberian housewife yet.

Sweet potato greens | Recipe

Add these to the list of foods I’m surprised we don’t see more often in American markets. They’re tasty, nutritious, easy to cook, and we’re already producing them everywhere we grow sweet potatoes. (My guess is they’re being fed to pigs.) Fortunately, Mama Pauline’s had them frozen in a big lump imported from Cameroon, and they cooked up quite like frozen spinach would. As with the palm butter, it’s a stew with a jumble of meats, though with a fresher and less heavy flavor. This was the clear crowd favorite!

Check rice | Recipe

I couldn’t figure out where the name comes from, does anyone know? The special ingredient is jute, which is known as molokhiya in the Arab world, an astonishingly mucilaginous green that until now I’d only encountered as a really goopy soup. Fortunately I find it goes a lot better when mixed in judicious quantities with rice.

Speaking of rice, it’s the main grain of this corner of Africa, and is typically made these days from the parboiled (aka converted) variety. Despite the bad rap that Uncle Ben gets for his converted rice, it turns out to actually be healthier than plain white rice, because the parboiling process forces vitamins from the germ into the heart of the grain.

Hot fried pepper | Recipe

If the intense spice of the peppers doesn't get you, then the pungency of the smoked fish will! Be sure to open the windows and turn on the vent when preparing and frying up this intense condiment, which brings an unmistakably West African flavor to the table. I scaled down the recipe by 2/3 and still had way too much left over!

Pineapple beer | Recipe

“Beer” is a misnomer, as there’s no yeast or brewing or alcohol involved. But it wouldn’t be right to call it “juice” either, since instead this is more of an extract made by boiling pineapple and leaving it to sit overnight, then straining the solids from the flavored water. I’m not quite sure why this is considered a better technique than simply juicing a pineapple and adding a weak simple syrup, it’s certainly more labor-intensive! But I guess you can do it with nothing more specialized than a knife and a strainer (or a substitute like an old, clean t-shirt), rather than something to press juice with.

Ricebread | Recipe

While much of Liberian food is quite similar to that of the surrounding countries, one distinctive aspect is a tradition of baking that returned feed slaves brought back from the US. This recipe’s understated name leaves out an important part, it’s full of plantains along with broken rice. It’s rich and hearty, though not too sweet, a nice gluten-free breakfast option that we happened to eat for dessert.

Meal 95: Lesotho

I didn't plan it this way or expect it to happen, but my gosh, what a pretty meal Lesotho offered. All these portions with different colors and textures look almost like an artist's palette. The dishes are quite plain, with such simple preparation that many barely have a recipe, but in combination there's lots of variety. It also happens to be quite healthy! This meal is definitely representative of summertime, when more food can be eked out of the meager, mountainous soil.

This was our first Nosh after getting press on NPR and our local OPB, and one of the many people who reached out to us was Erin, who did Peace Corps in this little country surrounded by South Africa. Between her fellow volunteer Anne and others who've blogged about their eating experience there, I was able to piece together a decent idea of what to serve. To be clear, this is far more variety than most people in Lesotho eat most days, but the intention is always to go a step up to what would be at a celebration or a feast.

Our guests were Levi, Julie, another Julie, Greg, Matt, Will, Annie, Lauren, Will, and of course Erin, who told some fascinating stories, including the habit of hiking to hilltops for cell reception!

Motoho | Sour sorghum porridge

I read that Basotho (that's the name for the people of Lesotho) have a taste for fermented and tangy things, so I wanted to give this a shot. I figured I'd make a batch of this and then we'd move onto pap, the more typical cornflour-based porridge that's the true foundation of Basotho cuisine, but one batch of the sorghum got us through the meal!

As with most soured foods, the way you make it is by putting a bit of the previous batch in the new batch so the bacteria and yeast can grow, but of course I don't know anyone with motoho at the ready, so I did the next best thing and dropped in some of my own sourdough starter which is typically intended for breads with wheat flour, and mixed in enough water for a stiff dough. (You can also leave it out for a few days and hope it sours right, but that method is unpredictable and I couldn't take the risk.) After an overnight in an oven gently heated by the warming drawer, this dough had the unmistakable, slightly sweet and definitely sour whiff of fermentation gone right. Add more water, simmer and stir, done.

I found this surprisingly tasty, definitely more palatable than the fermented cornflour we'd tried once or twice for West African countries. And it was thick enough to pick off a piece with your hand in the traditional way.

Morogo | Greens

Anne's recipe for greens is pretty simple:

-Heat quite a bit of oil in a pan

-Add cabbage (or another green, like swiss chard) that has been chopped quite finely

-Put on the lid and let it cook until tender, adding quite a bit of salt toward the end (in Lesotho, they sometimes also add Aromat -- ie MSG -- or curry powder too)

It looks like I cheated and added onions, but that's actually chard stem. Instead of Aromat or curry powder, I used a Maggi bouillon cube, which has enough MSG to be almost the same thing! Quite tasty for how basic it is. Thanks, MSG.

Tamati | Tomato-carrot stew

With three ingredients (plus oil and salt), this was just about the most complicated dish, and even then it's pretty simple. Anne again:

-Heat some oil in a pan -Add quite a bit of diced onion and saute until translucent -Add chopped carrots and cook/stir for a few minutes -Add lots of diced tomato -Let simmer as long as you want and add salt to taste (this recipe is not an exact science, just follow your gut re: proportions. It should end up thick-sauce consistency. In a lot of villages, they make this without the carrots, but I think it is a lot tastier with...).

For being such simple vegetables and nothing more than salt, somehow this came out really tasty. I credit the carrots.

Dinawa | Beans

Nothing more than pink beans (which I found at a Mexican market) simmered for a long time with a bouillon cube. I told you this was a pretty healthy cuisine!

Lekhotloane | Bashed beef | Recipe

Beef is a special food, apparently rather less common than chicken, but I couldn't find a distinctively Basotho chicken recipe but I did for beef. It sounds unpleasant to describe a brisket that's boiled for a long time before being bashed in a large mortar and pestle, but that's exactly what this was and it was delicious.

Mokopu | Pumpkin

Kabocha squash, boiled, mashed, with salt. Can it get simpler?

Bete | Beets

Yes! Even simpler! One ingredient only: beets, boiled, cooled until I could peel them, then sliced. A big boost to the color-wheel, and no seasoning needed since several other dishes were pretty salty.

Gemere | Ginger beer | Recipe

If you've ever wanted to experiment with home brewing, ginger beer is absolutely the easiest way to start. It may seem like a lot of steps, but it's all very easy and forgiving; so long as you have a large vessel and some plastic bottles, you're in business. (Of course, you need other stuff like ginger.) You end up with a very mildly alcoholic brew, and the unique satisfaction of tasting effervescence on your tongue that you made happen by mixing yeast and sugar and sealing it off. Goes great with gin, by the way.

Jello trifle | Recipe

One Peace Corps blogger mentioned a curious dessert that combines Jello and custard with cookies for good measure, and that was just too wonderfully weird to pass up. Indeed, I found a recipe in a Mormon newsletter from the '70s of just this sort of dish from neighboring South Africa, so voila. Without any guidance on the flavors I went with lemon and strawberry gelatins. It wasn't half bad, though the soaked cookies were a bit disconcerting. I'll keep this recipe in my back pocket in case I need to go to a "Midwest in the '70s" potluck or the like.

Meal 94: Latvia

Thanks to my grandfather’s Latvian physical therapist, I got plenty of on-the-ground advice. She connected me to folks from back home, so huge thanks to my new Latvian buddies Mara, and particularly Zane, for the help — I’m sure what I ended up cooking was tastier and more authentic because of your suggestions.

The heart of Latvian food is similar to its Balkan neighbors’ — fish, preserved and roasted meats, root vegetables, some dairy — though with even more of an emphasis on rye than I saw elsewhere. Not only did we have two types of rye bread, we also had a drink and a dessert made out of it!

We also enjoyed stories, artwork, and photos from Bill, our guest of honor who lived in Riga, the capital, while managing Peace Corps operations in the Baltic states in the mid-90s. Our other guests were Haley, Alondra, Annette, Jason, Jens, Molly, Sarah, and Estel.

Kvass | Rye soda

This is a soda made from rye bread. Yes, it’s weird, but not as weird as I’d expected. To me, it tasted like a bizarro version of root beer. I actually rather liked it!

Jāņu siers | Caraway cheese | Recipe

This cheese, traditionally eaten for the midsummer festival but now popular year-round, sure has a lot of ingredients! I’m not sure if it’s quite accurate to call it truly homemade cheese, since it starts with store-bought curds as a base, but given all the work done to it — regular and buttermilk, plus egg yolks and whites, not to mention the caraway seeds, and all that straining! — it certainly feels legit to say I made cheese.

It sure looked right: nice and firm, lightly yellow, attractively flecked with seeds. Just one problem, it wasn’t nearly salty enough, and hence it was pretty bland out there on the table. The recipe said “salt to taste,” which to me makes sense for something easily adjusted like a sauté or a stew, but in hindsight I should have looked to another recipe for guidance on how much to use, since by the time I could actually taste it as a cheese, it was too late. Oh well!

Speķa pīrāgi | Bacon buns | Recipe at end of post

A rich dough, made with the holy dairy trinity of butter, milk, and sour cream, envelops a filling of smoked bacon, and it tastes just as good as you’d expect. Zane, the son of a professional baker, was extremely helpful with his advice, carefully and thoughtfully conveyed. I’ve tweaked it (but not much!) for easier comprehension for an American cook — for instance, I’ve converted “half an Ikea bowl” into a more standard measurement :)

The dough is fun and relatively easy to work with, as all that butterfat makes it so nice and soft, and so long as you get it all wrapped up you don’t need to worry too much about the shape. The real genius of this recipe, though, is that by using uncooked bacon as the filling, you get the fat to render inside the bun, and hence to drop into and crisp up the bottom. Really, really delicious! I could see bringing these to a potluck.

Rupjmaize latviskā gaumē | Pumpernickel bread | Recipe

It’s maybe a good thing that even these days you can’t find everything at the local fancy supermarket, because that means you just have to go to an ethnic market for some things. In this case, it was the hunt for kibbled rye, aka pumpernickel, that sent me to Good Neighbor Market on SE 82nd. (Thanks, Deena, for the recommendation!) This was a no-nonsense Russian market: every sign in Cyrillic, no music playing, just slow-moving elderly immigrants studiously shopping for groceries from back home. It took me a while to find, but I did indeed sight some bags of this minimally processed grain in a pile of other bagged dry goods. (They also had a surprising number of foods from the Baltics, including the kvass (see above) and herring (see below).)

By the time I went to the store, I’d trained my sourdough starter on (standard) rye flour, so it was ready to go to work overnight on the pumpernickel. The recipe starts out looking all precise with measurements for this much flour and that much caraway, but then, as so many bread recipes do, it evolves into trying to giving you a sense of what the bread should feel and sound like, and a suggestion to add dry or wet as necessary to make it right. Fortunately I’ve made enough rye breads now not to be intimidated by how ridiculously sticky it is, and resisted the temptation to add more than a little white flour, and the result paid off: a dense, but moist, loaf! I ended up making so much that even after what was served on the table with the meal, as well as the bread soup (see below), I was able to freeze a whole loaf. I’ll probably keep that for Lithuania!

Saldskabmaize | Sweet & sour bread | Recipe

Yes, I made two breads, I couldn’t help myself. But this one’s rather different. Instead of water, it uses apple cider as the liquid, adding the “sweet” to add contrast to the sourdough. The recipe didn’t at all specify whether this was to be hard cider, or simply pressed apple juice, but since I only had the former, that’s what I went with. The resulting bread was really tasty, certainly lighter than the pumpernickel but with stilly plenty of that good ol’ Baltic rye taste. This, too, provided a full extra loaf for freezing.

Galerts | Jellied pork | Recipe

One admittedly excellent problem of living in a place where such excellent ingredients are available is they can throw a recipe out of whack. For instance, this jellied pork loaf recipe calls for 6-8 pork hocks plus a pound of meat, but the hocks at Tails and Trotters were so meaty that I got three of them plus an extra bone to make sure I’d have enough natural gelatin to make it set. It was still way too much meat! I saved about a pound for other recipes beyond what I made into this dish.

Not surprisingly, this was an odd one: bits of pulled-pork-soft meat and chunks of skin held together by pork-flavored jello, flavored with little more than salt plus some carrot slices on the bottom. The flavor was nice if a little bland. I regret forgetting the mustard to go with it, and I also read later that sometimes it’s sprinkled with vinegar. I had the leftovers a little later with mustard, and despite the odd texture, I found it actually pretty tasty.

Selyodka pod shuboy | Layered herring salad | Recipe

I call it the Baltic seven-layer dip. Instead of guacamole, beans, salsa, etc., you have a base of herring with beets, apples, potatoes, and a mayonnaise dressing. We had something very similar for the Estonian meal, and I’ve seen it at Russian markets, so it’s clearly quite a thing. And pretty much everywhere, it seems to be called “herring under a blanket” or “herring in a jacket.” It’s an ingenious way of using cheaper and filling ingredients to extend the intense flavor of the herring.

I really enjoyed this dish. The apples provide a crunchy contrast to an otherwise mushy dish, and the flavors run the gamut from fishy to earthy to sweet to herby (from the dill) to, well, whatever beets taste like. With a mayonnaise-sour cream dressing holding it all together, it’s pretty much a Slavic sampler platter minus meat!

Rasols| Potato salad | Recipe

Apparently every Latvian family has its own recipe for potato salad. As Mara, another helpful Latvian looped into the email chain, told me, “everyone will swear- this is The Recipe :) And I swear - my potato salad tastes better than that one!” I was a bit skeptical of the canned green peas and other ingredients that I hadn’t seen in other recipes, so I ended up making a more generic recipe than her family’s, and maybe that was a mistake. The one I made was totally passable, but was fairly boring. The one good thing was the mayo: I got a Russian mayonnaise from the store, which was excellently tangy. Maybe Mara’s statement wasn’t hyperbolic, but actually true, that hers is The Recipe :)

Pelēkie zirņi ar speķīti | Grey peas with bacon | Recipe

One of those hidden gems that doesn’t sound or look like much, but is actually really darn tasty, especially if you use high-quality bacon. The hardest part of making this dish is finding the dried, round, grey peas. After that it’s a cinch to boil them, mix with fried bacon and onion, and that’s it. Serve, enjoy.

Maizes zupa | Rye bread soup dessert | Recipe

Soup for dessert, or rye bread soup, would be notable enough. But a sweet, cold, rye bread soup for dessert? Leave it to the rye-crazy Latvians to come up with this one. In the tradition of French toast or panzanella salad, it’s a creative reuse of otherwise unpalatable old bread, with some cranberry juice and dried fruit to liven it up. I found it pretty tasty with that distinctive rye nuttiness, though it was really heavy for a dessert!

Zane’s father’s bacon buns

7g dry yeast

1/4 cup sugar

pinch of salt

1 cup milk

150g butter

3 cups of flour, roughly

1 tbsp oil

3 tbsp sour cream

1/2 pound bacon, chopped

1/2 onion, finely diced

Mix dry yeast with warm about a quarter cup of water and half a teaspoon of sugar, set aside to proof.

Use a pot large enough to mix up the dough. Pour in milk, place on stove and heat, then add butter, sugar and salt. Don’t let it boil, just warm up and mix until butter is melted. Remove from heat, add oil and sour cream, mix everything together. Then add risen yeast.

Now you will have to use your palm. Add flour with your left hand and knead with the right hand. You can add one cup of flour right away, but then add in smaller portions. And then you have to see.. clap a bit dough.. if it comes of easy (jumps) from the palm when you lift it fast and is not too soft, the dough will be good. It should be sticky, but if it’s too sticky and doesn’t jump off your hand, then add more flour. Don’t add too much flour or it won’t puff up properly. That is the trickiest part!  So when you have the right feeling :))) sprinkle flour over the dough and cover with towel. Leave for ~ 30 min to rise in a warm place.. then check and when the dough has risen, punch it down and let rise again.

Preheat the oven to 410°F and prepare a work surface with flour. When the dough has risen, punch it down, take a large piece of the dough. Roll it into a rope 1.5 inches in diameter. Cut it to pieces about 1.5 inches wide. Roll out each piece into an oval. On one half of it, put a teaspoonful of the filling. Fold the dough over, pinching the edges together. Make sure there are no openings left, or the filling will leak out of the seam.

Place the finished buns on an ungreased cookie sheet, with the seams underneath. When pan is full let it stand a bit in warm place and then brush with beaten egg. Bake for about 15 minutes, until golden brown.

Meal 93: Lebanon

As I caught myself grumbling about having to clean my two food processors and the mixer with a meat-grinder attachment, I realized how it’s unlikely I’d take on this project without the aid of electric appliances. I shudder to think of how long it would have taken to mash the hummus, emulsify the garlic sauce, and grind or chop the meat with only the power of my arms. I wouldn’t have cooked nearly as many dishes if I’d had to do that!

Lebanese food is an incredibly popular cuisine. In fact, many of these dishes are extremely common throughout the Middle East, and it’s taken a lot of restraint not to make hummus and tabbouli for just about every Arab country’s meal. I was eager to throw in some variety, to explore Lebanese dishes that aren’t as familiar to our palate, but in talking with our dear friend Kate and our new friend Melia about what their Lebanese families would cook, it kept coming back to the classics. Authenticity isn't just what you make, but how much and how it's served, so we had a whole messload of mezze, sharable platters, to create a sense of abundance and a variety of flavors. (One might argue that authenticity also involves the cooking techniques, which my Cuisinart and I acknowledge but, frankly, often ignore.)

In addition to Melia, who was very generous with her time both in helping to plan the meal and also in cooking, we had her boyfriend Zef, as well as Laura, Laura (pronounced the Italian way!), Andrew, John, Alicia, Iris, Alley, Ana, Miguel, and Will.

Note: for dishes where recipes aren't linked, they were taken from a cookbook called Alice's Kitchen. 

Kabees | Pickles | Recipes: turnip, mixed

From what I read on multiple sites, the annual process of preserving the summertime abundance of fruits and vegetables in Lebanon, mouneh, is a cherished tradition. Naturally, then, pickled foods are commonplace on the Lebanese table, and I tried out two different recipes.

The one I was most eager to make was for turnips, stained pink by beets in the bottom of the jar, and kept crisp because rather than boiling to sterilize, I simply moved them to the fridge once they’d sat out for about a week in their vinegar brine. Sour, slightly sweet, slightly bitter, and with a dazzling color, I’d call these a big success, a great burst of flavor and crunch to accompany just about anything except dessert.

The other was a mixed quick pickle, featuring everything from cauliflower to green beans to carrots. I thought this one turned out okay, though to my taste there was too much sugar. Maybe I should have also left it on the counter to age for a few days rather than throwing it straight into the fridge.

Moutabal | Mashed eggplant dip | Recipe

Sometimes I find connections between faraway cuisines in the funniest way. While I was planning this eggplant dip, the chunkier and less creamy cousin of baba ghannoush, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I did an eggplant dip for the previous meal, Laos. But when I looked around the kitchen for a suitable vessel for mashing up the dish and logically arrived at my oversized African mortar and pestle, I realized that I’d used the exact same vessel for making an eggplant dip a few weeks prior.

Anyway, if you can get over the fact that the scraped-out innards of roasted eggplant have the appearance and texture of alien brains, you might enjoy this one as a more rustic alternative. It’s pretty simple ingredient-wise, though it does take some time to let the juice drain out of the roasted vegetable. Skip the food processor for this one, both because you don’t want a purée, and also because if you’re cooking other Lebanese dishes, that appliance is probably being put into service for another dish too.

Hummus | Chickpea-yogurt dip | Recipe

I like the Lebanese version of hummus: lower on the garlic, higher on the tahini, and a hefty dollop of yogurt to make things nice and creamy. I cooked the chickpeas from scratch, which is really very little work and just requires some advanced planning, and tastes so much better and makes an incomparably better texture, both smoother and fluffier, than if using canned. The one tweak I made to the recipe was one I learned for the Israel meal, using a bit of reserved cooking water instead of the plain warm water.

Tabbouli

I was thinking of skipping this dish, as it’s really well known and I was trying to make a point of getting in some variety, but then I read that Lebanon takes its National Tabbouli Day really seriously, and Melia shared her family’s handwritten recipe.

A true Lebanese tabbouli should be mostly parsley, with just enough fine fine burghul wheat to hold things together, flecks of tomato for color and contrast, and oil and lemon to make it sing. A lovely, fresh contrast to all that dairy. Thanks to John for all that chopping!

Lebneh | Thickened yogurt | Recipe 

Lebneh, the simple yet incredibly addictive strained yogurt, came so close to taking off in the US. For a good while, Trader Joe’s stocked it, but unfortunately they gave it the unromantic name of “yogurt cheese.” With a name that makes it sound more like a health food than an the exotic, versatile food-with-a-story that it is, TJ’s dropped it a few years back in favor of the Greek yogurt craze that swept the nation like a very thick, stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth wave.

Fortunately, lebneh is easy to make, but yet again takes some foresight: just take some thicker yogurt (Nancy’s works great, a pourable Bulgarian won’t) and strain it in cheesecloth. How long to strain is a matter of how you plan to use it: 2-8 hours to make a dip of varying thickness, or 24+ hours if you’re going to make intense, oil-preserved balls with a distinctive cheesy heft. I made both!

The dip, anointed with a pool of olive oil and a generous shower of za’atar spice blend, is just heavenly, simply scooped up with pita. Or use it as a spread in your sandwich. The balls were really thick, dry and dense enough that you could pick it up with your fingers — and remember, it’s nothing more than strained yogurt! — and hence would make for a great piece on a finger-food platter.

Toum | Garlic sauce | Recipe

If you’ve gotten kebab at a Middle Eastern restaurant, chances are it was accompanied by a pungent, unctuous snow-white sauce. It’s toum, a very close relative of mayonnaise, except instead of eggs, it’s garlic that holds oil and garlic in spreadable, well-blended suspension. So long as you’ve got a food processor, the hardest part of making this versatile, long-storing condiment is peeling all those cloves of garlic! I ended up making this with about 2/3 less oil than called for, so it was extremely strong, but still had the right texture.

Man’oushe | Za'atar flatbread | Recipe

Most spices you use a little pinch here, a dab there. Za’atar is best as a healthy dousing. This blend of thyme, sumac (a tart dried berry, apparently) and sesame seeds has a musty flavor and a fun little grit in the mouth that’s somehow excellent in large doses. There’s so many uses for it, but the most reverent presentation is mixed with olive oil as the sole topping for a flatbread.

I thought this recipe turned out great. It was quite sticky as warned, but as I kneaded and rolled, little dustings of flour helped keep everything from gluing to my work surface. I got a pizza stone and my big cast iron griddle really hot in the oven, and by gum, these things turned out just beautifully: a lightly browned crust, and a soft, dry, mild, toothsome interior providing just the right contrast to the oily, gritty, and bold topping.

Pita | Recipe

I’m glad this wasn't the only bread I made, because I wasn’t too happy with these. Despite the evident care that went into a technique for using foil to get the right puffiness and avoid crisping, in the end my pita were, well, crispy and flat. It probably has something to do with the fact that a home oven just can’t achieve the blistering heat and correct humidity to make a bread that cooks almost instantly and puffs up before it can brown to make that lusciously soft, big pita like you get at a Lebanese restaurant. What I made wasn’t bad, it was just more cracker-like than a pita ought to be.

Kibbeh bil sanieh | Bulgur meat casserole | Recipe

The classic kibbeh is a torpedo-shaped ball of bulgur wheat stuffed with meat and typically fried, though many variations abound. For our Iraq meal we make a kibbeh with a shell of rice; you can also stuff it with squash, or serve it raw similar to a tartare, or, as we did, make a casserole. I chose this variation for two reasons: I’ve never had it before, and it’s way easier to bake and keep warm than batches of fried balls.

Good thing I have a meat grinder attachment for my Kitchenaid, because the beef needed to be ground several times to be super fine. Some of that beef was then ground up further in the Cuisinart, with the soaked bulgur. That’s right, both the filling and the “crust” have meat in them! If you don’t have a grinder, make sure to go to a butcher who can do the extra grinding for you. It makes an important difference in the texture.

I thought this was really tasty, though if I do this dish again I’ll be a little more generous with the spices — this one was light and delicate, but if there’s spices in my meat, I prefer them to be bold!

Warak inab | Stuffed chard leaves

Surely you’ve heard of stuffed grape leaves, a bundle of green filled with rice, herbs, etc. But what do you do when it’s winter and the vines are bare? Well, you can either use leaves that you pickled or froze, but like an idiot, I didn’t do that even though we have a great grape vine in our new back yard. (Yes, I could buy them, but what’s the fun in that?) Or, you can substitute with a more seasonable vegetable, like chard.

What a pleasant surprise! Earthy, bitter chard, slightly toothy even after a long simmer, balances the soft, bright, lemony filling so well. Give it a shot, just prepare for it to take longer than the recipe suggests.

Shourbat adas | Lentil soup

This was nice enough, and easy to make, but didn’t quite have the sort of rich, satisfying flavor I’ve enjoyed in some lentil soups I’ve had before. Maybe it’s that it’s a vegetarian recipe, or maybe it doesn’t have enough spice (definitely could have used more cumin). Not bad, but you can probably find a better recipe somewhere. Note the dollop of garlic sauce in the foreground — that sure helped!

Sfouf | Turmeric-anise yellow cake | Recipe

How exotic and beautiful, right? Spices we rarely encounter in dessert, with rich ingredients. and a fanciful name to boot. Well, sorry to say, this was a dense, bland disappointment. More sugar and spices would have helped, but I’d also look for a recipe with a bit more leavening. Unless this is just how it’s supposed to be, and I just wasn’t in the right mainframe or something.

Muhallabieh | Rosewater pudding

Now this was a winner in my book. I love the exotic fragrance of orange blossom and rose waters, and just a little goes a long way on a bright-white canvas of milk simply thickened with cornstarch. It’s super easy to make, so long as you do it enough ahead of time to let it cool, and you don’t need much per person since just a little dish is quite satisfying.

Arak | Anise liqueur

If you like ouzo, sambuca, raki, pastis, or any of those other anise liqueurs, you might like arak. If not, you won't. Incidentally, we've got about 3/4 of a bottle of arak on hand in case anyone wants some.