Chicken Kebab with Spicy Bulgur Salad

This was supposed to be a recipe for shrimp kebabs and spicy bulgur salad.  But there was chicken in the freezer, so I used that.  Instead of trying to adapt the shrimp kebab recipe for chicken, I marinated it in olive oil, garlic, and some of the spice mix used in the bulgur salad.  It was simple and fast. But, the rest of this dish is kind of labor intensive, since there are four major components that need to be made: Golden Spice Mix, Chicken Kebabs, Spicy Tomato Dressing, and Spicy Bulgur Salad.  I would say that if you are in a hurry but would love the Spicy Bulgur Salad, the tomato dressing is definitely optional.  I loved it, but if you're strapped for time just omit it, the dish will still be good.  Plus the salad is definitely scalable, it kept in the fridge for 3 days! The spice mix takes no time at all to make and the chicken can cook on the grill while you prepare the bulgur salad ingredients.

The bulgur salad looks deceptively easy, but the dressing requires peeled and seeded tomatoes, which is a huge, time consuming pain in the butt.  That said, it's a fabulous dressing.  It has just the right amount of spiciness for the chicken, and the lemon and ginger stop it from being too tomatoey.

The star of this meal was definitely the bulgur salad.  It was great with the chicken, and I ate the leftovers for lunch two days later!  This recipe comes from Saha, Greg Malouf's first book on Middle Eastern cuisine; it features dishes from Lebanon and Syria.  It's thinner than Turquoise, so it has fewer recipes.  I like how Saha has several different spice mixes and sauces that can be used in the main dish recipes.

Keepin' it klassy with a posh serving dish for the dressing.

Olive and Egg Salad

Don't let the picture fool you, this is an awesome salad!  It's a great way to use hard boiled eggs.  The recipe can be halved to use this salad as an appetizer or the full recipe makes an excellent entree.  The dressing is simple; it's just lemon, garlic, and olive oil.  It adds a nice tang to the salty olives, slightly sharp red onions, and toasty pine nuts.  Even though there is a good bit of chopping, this salad is relatively quick if you're using left over hard boiled eggs.

The recipe is from my new Lebanese and Syrian cookbooks, Saha, by Greg and Lucy Malouf. I've had another of their books, Turquoise, for many years and I learned that they published Saha first.  Of course the last thing I need is another Middle Eastern cookbook, but I couldn't help myself!  I'm very glad I bought it.  It has fewer recipes than Turquoise, but so far all of them that I've tried have been fabulous. 

"Kibbeh" Meatballs

I've been away for a while, I went to Japan for vacation and it was fabulous!  Once I raid my local Japanese market, I'm definitely going to try and make some of the amazing food I tried while I was there.  Real ramen! Katsu! Sushi!  Well, maybe not sushi.  From what I hear it's expensive to ride in an ambulance.

But until then, here is a dish that was almost a colossal failure until my husband suggested we turn it into meatballs. It turned out to be a great tasting meal that made enough meatballs for me to freeze some extra.  I topped it with some super easy muhammara sauce and served it with a side of tabbouleh.

The plan was to make this recipe for baked kibbeh.  I don't know if it was because I ground my own lamb (Wegman's was out), if my onions were too watery, or my food processor juiced up on steroids while I was away, but it turned my kibbeh shell mixture into a sticky, runny pile of gloop that was impossible to roll into a uniform sheet and even harder to cut into rounds with a cookie cutter.  As I sat with my lamb gloop in one bowl and my delicious smelling filing in a frying pan and attempted to figure out how exactly I was going to turn it into kibbeh, my husband had an idea.  Why not just stir the filling into the meat disaster and make meatballs?  Brilliant!

Tuna with Tomatoes and Capers with Spinach, Beans, and Prunes

This tuna dish is simple and quick. It doesn't have many ingredients and if you like your tuna rare like me, there isn't a lot of cooking time. If you heave nice piece of fish, the sauce is tangy and flavorful but won't mask the taste of the meat.  I served it with a healthy side dish of spinach, kidney beans, and prunes.

I made the spinach dish because I wanted to use the rest of my prunes left over from my Cornish game hen meal.  I'd never used them before and I didn't want them to languish in my pantry until they fossilized.  My husband and I disagreed about how good the spinach dish was.   I loved it.  I would make it again. I love spinach!  I thought the sweet prunes were interesting and I thought they were a good addition to the earthiness of the spinach and beans.  My husband really hates fruit as part of dinner, so he was not a fan of the prunes at all. If you don't like sweetness in your veggies (or hate fruit in general), skip the prunes.  The side dish is vegetarian and I think that it's hearty enough for a main dish if you make extra. 

Persian Sweet and Sour Stuffed Chicken

I've been dying to try so many of the chicken recipes in Food of Life, my Persian cookbook.  So many of them call for an entire chicken, and I don't know how well stuffed chicken leftovers would work the next day.  But, when I saw the recipe for sweet and sour stuffed chicken that could also be done with a Cornish game hen, I was stoked.  Before this dish, I'd never eaten Cornish game hen.  My mom told me that back in the 70s and 80s, they were a Big Thing for people to cook when they entertained friends.  Wikipedia tells me that they're basically small chickens, and it tasted exactly that way.  It wasn't gamey at all.

This was my first time roasting an entire bird.  I've never hosted Thanksgiving or Christmas, so I've never done turkey, and I've never had the guts to roast a whole chicken when I have guests for dinner. It's generally a bad idea to experiment on friends.  I was a little intimidated, at first.  I was nervous that the meat would be dry and nasty, but this dish turned out *amazing.* The meat was moist and the skin was tangy from the lime juice in the basting liquid.  The stuffing was sweet, but not cloyingly so, and the onion and spices made it very hearty.  I would definitely make this for my friends for a special dinner.  

Quick Side Dish: Zucchini with Golden Raisins and Pine Nuts

I'm trying to find more quick, easy vegetable side dishes to serve at meals.  Right now, I don't have many in my regular rotation.   I think this zucchini dish will make it onto my list.  It's from Claudia Roden's New Book of Middle Eastern Food.  I served it with some baked falafel.  The combination of pine nuts and raisins is, according to the book, something that the Arabs brought all the way to Spain and Sicily.  The sweetness of the raisins and the nuttiness of the pine nuts go well together. I used a little extra of both.  Normally, I think more lemon juice is the proper solution to any cooking problem.  But, in this case, I think that there could have been less.  I used about 1 Tbsp of lemon juice and next time I'd use maybe half that.  This side dish took less than 15 minutes to make, including prep time! 

Shirazi-Style Pan Cooked Lamb Kebab

I enjoy looking at the photos in Food of Life, but so many of  Najmieh Batmanglij's recipes are more appropriate for a feast than as dinner for two people.  But, this kebab recipe was easily scaled back for two people.

I know kebabs require skewers, but the only ones I have right now are metal and too long to fit in my largest pan.  So, I improvised! This Persian dish looks really awesome in the pan as it cooks.  It's a little less pretty as the tomatoes break down, but the lamb is so tender!  This dish is cooked by layering onion slices, lamb chunks, and tomatoes, to allow the tomatoes to release their juices over the meat and onions. 

Onions, lamb, and tomatoes layered in the pan.  Also look, my stove is clean!

Antep Lamb Not-Kebabs with Sumac Onions and Asparagus

Okay, so the plan was to make Antep kebabs from Turquoise, my awesome Turkish cookbook.  Too bad we forgot to turn the gas grill off the night before and all the propane escaped.  Since the grill was out of commission, my only choice was to use my Le Creuset grill pan.  The problem is that my metal skewers are way too long for me to use them with it.  So, kebabs were out of the question.  Also too bad: I bought lamb loin, not ground lamb, because apparently I don't know how to read.

But, this dish was still very good, and eliminating the step of skewering the meat may have made it easier to prepare.  The Lamb Spice Mix is fabulous, and would work really well outside of this dish. 

Since I wasn't skewering my meat and onions, I decided to thinly slice the onion and cook it with a little sumac for a tart punch.  I wanted some side dishes, so I made simple steamed asparagus and used some previously made hummus with pita. 

This salvaged meal turned out pretty awesome!

Caspian Fava Bean Omelet

Or, more accurately, fried eggs amidst fava beans and dill.  That's not a bad thing, but I definitely feel like the description in my new book was a little off.  Maybe my definition of "omelet" is somewhat rigid, I was imagining using beaten eggs.  After actually reading the recipe instead of just skimming the ingredients and thinking, "this contains fava beans and a ton of garlic, awesome!" I realized that I'd basically be pouring four eggs into a pan filled with fava beans, dill, and spices.  I was a little concerned about how this vegetarian dish would turn out. Of all the new types of cooking I've tried recently, Persian seems the most challenging right now.  The ingredients are mostly familiar (except for some spices and fruits that aren't available), but the cooking methods are completely different from anything I'm used to.  So, I was a little apprehensive about cooking this dish.

According to my new cookbook, Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies, the Persian name for this dish is "baqala qataq." There are several different ways to spell "baqala qataq," but from my searching, I learned that it's a dish from Gilan, a province along the Caspian sea.  I really wanted to see a picture of how this dish should look, but despite my fearsome google-fu, it took me several minutes to find a picture of what this meal should look like.  Thankfully, my meal looked somewhat like the picture, except that I mauled my eggs.

One thing that I will absolutely do the next time I make this: use fresh fava beans!!  The book specified fresh or frozen fava beans. My grocery store had neither.  So, I bought a 1 lb can of fava beans.  While the dish still turned out well, I think that the canned beans added more salt, and their texture was probably different from the real thing.  I also suspect that canned fava beans don't absorb water as well as fresh or frozen.  And lastly, removing skins from canned fava beans is a huge pain in the butt.  With fresh ones, a few minutes of boiling and they slide right off.  Not so with the canned beans.  I don't recommend them.

I should warn you that this picture is not pretty.  Canned fava beans are beige.  Also, one of my egg yolks broke.  And at the end, I wasn't quite sure if the yolks were done, so I stabbed them a few times with a butter knife.  And my pan was too big.  Despite its homely appearance, this dish tasted quite good!  I love fried eggs, and I'd venture to say that if you like them too, you'd enjoy this dish.  Think of it as fried eggs on top of some tasty sauteed beans with spices.  There is a ginormous amount of garlic in this dish, but its bite is taken out by the long cooking time.  And it's balanced out by 2 cups of dill.  Overall, this is a very flavorful, garlicky, dill-y way to eat fried eggs.  I made the full recipe this time, and it was too much food.  One egg per person is definitely okay, especially when serving this dish with rice and a small salad.

Maybe stabbing the eggs wasn't the best idea ever. 

My First Foray into Persian Cooking

I just received my copy of Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies.  I've been intrigued by Persian cooking since I came across a few Persian recipes in a Middle Eastern cookbook.  Main ingredients in Persian cooking include a lot of foods I really enjoy: pistachio nuts, pomegranates, onions, garlic, dried fruits, and fresh herbs.

Instead of starting with something simple, I decided to throw myself in and make pistachio soup and Caspian olive and pomegranate salad.  Realistically, I should have picked just one of these and then accompanied it by something simple.  Instead, I spent a long time in the kitchen.  In the book, the picture of the soup is a nice, light green.  Because pistachios are green, right?  The recipe called for raw pistachios, and I can only get roasted.  So, maybe that's why my soup wasn't green.  Regardless, when I first sat down to eat, Dave and I were extremely skeptical because it didn't look anything like the picture.   The color, was, in fact, kind of off putting.  But, we were wrong to doubt the soup!

The spice mix was perfect, a nice body from the cumin and coriander and just a little kick from the cayenne.  The soup didn't taste like cream of pistachio, instead, it was pistachio with a little garlic, some cumin, and a little bit of sour tang from the orange and lime juices added at the end.  I didn't deviate from the recipe other than to omit the garnish entirely because I can't get barberries without ordering them online.  This soup can be made vegetarian by substituting vegetable broth for for chicken broth.  Even though I was halving the recipe, I added the full amount of garlic, spring onion, and leek, so the recipe below is how I made it.  If you want your soup less leeky, just use half a leek. 
 

I can't walk from the kitchen to the dining room without sloshing my soup all over the place.

Meatless Monday: Fattoush and Fava Beans

I love the idea of Meatless Monday, but it doesn't always happen.  My goal is to make at least two vegetarian meals each week, sometimes I make more.  Whenever I make kofte kebab, I always have leftover pita bread.  It doesn't keep for very long and it's too tasty to let go bad.  Making fattoush is a good way to use up leftover pita, and it's healthy!  Fattoush is a bread salad made with cucumber, tomato, onion, and herbs. The recipe I used from Arabesque also included romaine and mixed greens. The dressing is made with lemon juice, sumac, salt, and pepper.   I have a "sour tooth" so I love using lemon juice in salad dressing.  One of the many things that drew me to Middle Eastern cooking was that lemons are a popular ingredient.  Ever since I started experimenting with Middle Eastern food, I buy up to six lemons a week, it's awesome.

The side dish is a result of an impulse buy.  I was on my way to the green beans when I saw the fava beans.  I had no idea what to do with them at the time.  I boiled them for 5 minutes and sauteed them with some canned artichokes I had in the pantry, a little crushed red pepper, and a little too much harissa.  I'd definitely do it again since it was so easy, but I'd go easier on the harissa.  They were too spicy for my husband and almost too spicy for me.  

Bison Meatballs with Cilantro Yogurt Sauce

The White House Farmers Market is back!  Last year, I discovered the Gunpowder Bison and Trading Company.  I love bison!  It's leaner than beef and very flavorful.  The trick is to not overcook it.  I found this recipe for Middle Eastern bison meatballs when the farmers market first opened.  I bought the bison first and then needed to figure out what to do with it.  These meatballs are fantastic!  The recipe has a lot of ingredients and the meatballs themselves are pretty labor intensive, so this isn't for a work night unless you've got a partner in the kitchen.  Plus, it creates a lot of dirty dishes.  The sauce has a lot of ingredients, and the recipe says they should be chopped before tossing them in the blender.  But, if you've got a blender on steroids, it's fine to just toss everything in whole or very coarsely chopped.  The toasted ground seeds surprisingly add a lot of flavor to both the meatballs and the sauce, definitely don't leave them out if you make this.  The sauce isn't cooked, so I used nonfat Greek yogurt instead of whole milk yogurt and it was fine.  I think this is a great summer dish because the sauce is cold and light (and a fun color!).    

Lamb and Smoky Chili Lahmacun (Turkish "pizza")

I'm a bit of a pizza snob and consider delivery pizza to be cardboard smeared with red sugar paste tomato sauce and fake cheese.  So, I've always wanted to make my own.  When I found this recipe for lamb lahmacun, I was intrigued because it involved a very thin, crispy crust and lamb, which I've always got in the freezer.  Lahmacun originated in Syria, but is popular throughout the Middle East.  Translated, it means "meat with dough." The first time I made this, I didn't think it was very pretty.  Then I did a google image search and saw that mine looked pretty good.  ;)  I make this every time I've got 5 oz or so of ground lamb in my freezer.  It's a treat on a weekend when I've got some time to let the dough sit for 2 hours.  It's also a great excuse to drink a light to medium bodied red wine. 

The dough has to sit for a while, but making the lamb paste doesn't take very long at all.  I add a little extra smoky paprika since I use more lamb than a normal portion would call for (a proper half recipe for this would use 3.5 oz of ground lamb and I use 5).   I could never figure out what a "long red chili" was when it was called for in this book.  Further, Wegmans never has red chilis other than the tiny Thai chilis, and I don't think they belong in Turkish cooking.  So, I substitute a long green chili hoping that they're similar.  The combination of lamb, onion, tomato, spicy chili, and smoked paprika is absolutely wonderful!  And it makes my kitchen smell good. 

Fresh Pasta with Lentils and Caramelized Onions

This is an easy to make vegetarian dish that has very few ingredients!  It can be made with fresh or dried pasta.  I bought some fresh, but the original recipe specifically called for dried.  Part of the theory for using dried pasta is that it cooks in the same pot as the lentils, which should add more lentil flavor.  So, my fresh pasta version is probably less earthy than what the recipe intended.  The first time I made it a few weeks ago, I thought it was a little bland, but that was very easily rectified with a few dashes of Aleppo pepper.  Regular crushed red pepper would work too.  The most important thing for the flavor of this dish is to really let the onions caramelize. 

As Close to Pi as I'm Going to Get

Yesterday was Pi Day, 3/14.  I should probably turn in my nerd card since I didn't bake a pie.  I think I've baked approximately 3 pies in my entire life (4 if you count the Meringue Debacle of 2003).  While they were good, they can't hold a candle to my mom's pies.  Last night I got home from work and had a choice.  I could attempt to cobble together some sort of pie-shaped thing with ingredients already in my pantry.  Or, I could just cook dinner and then play computer games.  I decided to make a dish that most closely approximated pi(e).  Behold, kofte kebab over crispy pita with tomato sauce and spiced yogurt!  I am the first to admit that this dish isn't the prettiest plate in the world, but it tastes awesome.  And although it requires a decent bit of chopping, the cooking time is relatively short, about 10 minutes for the lamb and tomato sauce.  The yogurt doesn't require cooking and is spooned on cold. Since it's not cooked, nonfat yogurt works just fine.  I adapted the yogurt sauce a little to make it more flavorful. 

Quick Dinner: Eggplants in Spicy Honey Sauce, Hummus, and Citrus Salad

My experience with eggplant is limited.  I've grilled it once, tossed into a curry a handful of times, and made baba ghanoush occasionally.  It seems like a very versatile ingredient, but I don't really get around to cooking it very often. 

Sometimes, I don't feel like making something elaborate for dinner.  Usually it's because I'm too busy punching things in the face (that is, playing Batman: Arkham Asylum), or because  I went running or to yoga.  But, I've got to eat and microwaved meals so aren't my thing.  So, behold, Eggplant in Tangy Honey Sauce with a side of hummus and orange olive salad.  I made the hummus earlier in the week, so the only active time involved was plorping it down on the plate.  The citrus salad was quickly made while the eggplants were cooking. 

Although the eggplant was quite tasty, the star of the show was definitely the harissa hummus, which is just my regular hummus but with a ton of harissa added in while it was still in the food processor.  I remain obsessed with harissa because it's spicy, but has a flavor.  So many hot sauces are just for heat, while the harissa is tangy, peppery, and has just enough heat to make it spicy enough for me.  I suspect that in the future, I'll turn half my batch of regular hummus into harissa hummus.  

According to The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, the eggplant is a North African dish that is best served cold.  I was too hungry and ate it at about room temperature.  Next time, I'll let it cool all the way, but this time my impatience got the best of me. 

Broiled Scallops and Pasta with Smoky Red Pepper Sauce

I don't make scallops very often, but I really like them.  The handful of times I've made them, they've been sauteed.  Today, I didn't feel like sauteing them, so I decided to bread and broil them. I also wanted some pasta so I could play with an idea for a sauce. Now, both elements of this dish were separately very tasty.  But, I wouldn't serve them this way again.  It didn't occur to me until I served it, but the breading from the scallops came off a little into the pasta.  It didn't ruin the pasta, but it wasn't what I intended.  Next time, I would serve the pasta as its own dish, and place the scallops on a plate with nothing under them and some kind of side dish or salad.  Or, just put the scallops on the place and put the pasta next to them.  The sauce was thick enough that it wouldn't spread onto the scallops. 

Instead of using regular breadcrumbs, I used panko.  I added some chopped almonds, sumac, and a little Aleppo pepper.  Even though I didn't add a ton of each ingredient to the panko, they gave the scallops a nice flavor, especially the almonds, which got toasted under the broiler.  My inspiration for the breading came from Chicken with Pistachio and Sumac Breadcrumbs. I didn't have any eggs, so instead of dipping the scallops in egg, I brushed them with melted butter before rolling them in the panko.  For my pasta sauce, I used roasted red peppers, a spoonful of harissa, and some smoked paprika.  I didn't want to make a tomato sauce, and roasted bell pepper goes well with the almonds and sumac in the breading.  The red pepper sauce was quite good.  I didn't add any additional liquid, so the sauce wasn't watery, and it was a nice bright red color.  The little bit of harissa gave it a slight spiciness, and the smoked paprika added a level of complexity that I liked for a sauce with only 3 ingredients.

15 minute lunch: Harissa Squid and Shredded Carrot Salad

On weekends, I don't like to cook lunch.  I don't like sandwiches very much, and there aren't a lot of "lunchy" things that take very little time that I enjoy eating.  Most of the time, Dave and I end up going out.  But, he's not here today and I can't justify going to Baja Fresh when I have stuff in the fridge that I can make.  I bought some random squid tubes at the grocery store yesterday because I wanted to see what I could do with them.  I made this lunch in about 15 minutes from start to finish, not including clean up time!

I made the shredded carrot salad because I had two lonely carrots leftover from last week.  It's loosely based on a Moroccan salad I saw in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.  The squid is something I came up with on my own.  It turned out really well!  The harissa had just enough kick to it, without overpowering the squid.  The lemon juice added a nice tang.  I would definitely make this again because it was so quick.  Plus, it's healthy!

Baked Falafel and Tabbouleh

I love falafel!  I've always wanted to try making it.  But, I want to avoid frying my food.  Especially with something as addictive as falafel.  A while back, I posted a picture of baked falafel on my Facebook page.  It was my first attempt at making it, and it tasted great despite looking a little rough.  Last night, I made it a second time and it looked much better!  Just for fun, I put the older photo at the bottom of this post for comparison.  Both times I served it with a basic tabbouleh recipe I got from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, with extra lemon of course.  The small dish of sauce is something I made up.  There's a Lebanese restaurant near my house that serves falafel with a lemony, garlicky tahini sauce.  I attempted to approximate it, and it turned out to be really well!  I'm proud of myself for being able to figure out what the main ingredients were in the sauce and play with the ratios to get something I liked. 

Since the falafel is baked, it's not crunchy on the outside as if it were fried.  It still tastes like falafel however.  The tabbouleh is a very basic recipe, but it's fine just the way it is, except for a little extra lemon.  :) I made a half recipe this time, a full recipe is more than enough to feed 2 people as a side dish.  It kept well in the fridge overnight, I ate the rest for a snack. The tahini sauce is tart and tangy, with a little bit of a salty garlic taste to it.  It's awesome, but I don't know what it would go well with except for falafel.  I didn't measure anything when I made it, but I did my best to approximate it in my recipe below.

Grilled Tuna with Tomato Caper Sauce, Leek Salad, and Dolmas

Since the point of this blog is for me to document my learning experiences, I promised myself that I would post the dishes that weren't completely successful as well as the ones that were fabulous.  :)  The tuna tasted great, so did the sauce.  It just looked...unattractive.  The sauce didn't have any extra water added, but the tomatoes released their juices and the end result was a watery sauce.  The leeks were supposed to just be on the plate next to the tuna.  Amusingly, I saw a picture of this dish on a different blog later, and the author smartly photographed it from the side instead of from the top.  The sauce was intended to be a fancy version of the traditional Middle Eastern lemon and oil sauce.  There was a lot of oil in it, and I don't know if adding corn starch (my cheat to thicken sauce if I don't have a ton of time to reduce it) would have been appropriate.  The leek salad was quite good.  It's from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.  The recipe noted that leeks are very popular in Egypt, something I didn't know.  It was very easy to make and required very little active time. The dolmas are from Wegmans.  ;)