Chili and Garlic Okra with Pomegranate Molasses – Recipe

Chili and Garlic Okra with Coriander and Pomegranate Molasses

There are simple pleasures in life. Falling asleep in a garden, taking your shoes off after a long day at work, hugging a loved one… To me, there is many a simple pleasure to be had with food, but after a visit that has been long overdue to my homeland, Lebanon, I have one more to add to that list: making food from the produce in the garden that fed your parents and grandparents. Fresh, seasonal food that is bound to your history and forms part of your identity.

Stunningly beautiful okra flower and fruit

In anticipation of the return of his three sons (2 in Australia and 1 in America), dad made sure the garden is abundant with produce. And for days, mom has been holding off picking the okra so that we could pick it ourselves. Okra is one of those vegetables. You know what I’m talking about. You either love it, or you hate it. Cooked poorly, the slimy sludge oozes into the dish, turning it into a textural monster. But mom cooks nothing poorly, and the secret she tells me is to deep fry the Okra fruit (yes, it is a fruit), which eliminates the slimy liquid.

the day’s bounty of Okra fruit

Mom usually makes an okra stew with meat and tomatoes. But I wanted to do something a bit different, so we made both dishes. My recipe is so simple, that it does not need measurement. Simply deep fry some okra that has been cleaned like you see in the picture (get rid of the stem) and in a separate pan, fry some chopped garlic and chili. When the garlic is golden and crunchy, mix and cover the okra with the garlic and chili. Dish up in your serving plate and top with freshly chopped coriander and fruity, citrusy pomegranate molasses. This is a great mezze dish, so eat it with your fingers. No forks and knives, please…

Sweet Home Made Ablama – The Other Lebanese Stuffed Zucchini

ablama, stuffed Lebanese zucchinis

Google insists ablama is an American state, and my friends think it is a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd… In reality, it is neither. So Google had better get its facts right. Ablama is a variation on koussa mihchi, the better known stuffed Lebanese zucchinis, which are filled with a rice, meat, tomato filling and cooked in a tomato broth. This version is more carnivorous, with the filling being mainly meat, and the flavours are fuller and stronger.

Grey or Lebanese Zucchinis

Abu Hachem, my Dulwich Hill based Lebanese grocer had some fantastic young zucchinis, perfect for ablama, which requires the smaller, finger sized zucchinis. So I bought some, and decided to treat myself to this traditional Lebanese dish. This is a bit more of a demanding recipe, so make sure you have the time, and rest assured, the results are worth it.


The cored zucchinis, with the nakoora, the traditional corer

First, you start by coring the zucchinis. For this, you will need the Middle Eastern corer, or nakoora, which you should be able to find at any Middle Eastern store. To core a zucchini takes practice and patience, and I’m not there yet myself, but this recipe is tolerant to some cracks and holes, no problem. To use the corer, push the blade into the zucchini repeatedly, attempting to reach the end without piercing it, trying to draw a circle with your blade. Then holding the zucchini in one hand, your thumb pointing away from you and the corer safely inside, start turning the zucchini on your palm. This will remove the centre if done well. Preserve the insides for an omelet.

Wash and put the zucchinis aside, and start preparing the filling. Finely chop 4 large onions, and fry in the biggest pan you can find, with plenty of vegetable oil and salt. When nice and well caramelised, add 1 kilo of beef mince, bit by bit, making sure you fry the meat. That means, you shouldn’t put all the meat in one go. Also, make sure the meat is at room temperature, since it doesn’t require to be heated too much, thereby frying better. Add 1 heaped teaspoon of cinnamon and 2 and a half of fine ground black pepper (not cracked!). Fry the meat well and then decanter into a bowl. When the meat cools down enough to handle, pour the oil back into the fry pan. Add as many golden fried pinenuts as you wish to the meat mixture and fill the zucchinis, pushing the meat down with your pinkie to ensure the zucchini is full.

fried stuffed zucchinis

Fry the zucchinis in the same pan you fried the meat in (don’t clean the pan) and turn them until they are a golden brown and wrinkly. Meanwhile, fry 2 cloves of garlic in a pot, add 4 tablespoons of tomato paste and 700 ml of boiling water. When the zucchinis are ready, take them out of the pot, deglaze with some of the tomato broth you just prepared, put the zucchinis back in and top with the remaining broth and the remaining meat filling. Cover the pan and simmer for 15 minutes. You can have this as it is, or with some rice and goat’s yoghurt.

Shawarma – The real kebab

shawarma, the Lebanese kebab

Can I have barbeque sauce, extra cheese and tabbouli with that? Certainly not!
Imagine the horror upon my first encounter with the Aussie kebab! I don’t want to dig deep and talk too much about frozen reconstituted meat made from God knows what, impersonating as a poor excuse for a kebab. In fact, I want to avoid that all together. This quick post is about shawarma, the real kebab, and mainly about what goes with it.

the perfect kebab, shawarma only needs tahini, parsley, sumac rubbed onions and tomatoes

Making shawarma is simple. Just marinate some lamb in red wine vinegar, oil, salt (yes), all spice, cinnamon, black pepper and a bit of cumin. Wait for a day or two, then you can oven roast or pan fry the meat. But how do you eat it? The answer is simple, and so it should be, as the flavour of the meat needs to shine through, along with a cleansing freshness that comes from only 4 other ingredients: finely chopped parsley, onions rubbed with sumac, tomatoes and a slightly thin tahini sauce (tahini, garlic, water, lemon juice and salt, whizzed up in a food processor, made to taste). That’s all it needs. Try this combination, and you will never turn back. And please, no cheese.

Sweet Falafel? Why not?

What you see above may horrify and shock you, but yet, a part of you will be tempted to try these. I had the idea in a flash of brilliance. You see, to us Lebanese, tahini is a major major part of our diet. We make hommos and baba ghannouj with it, and we put it on top of fried fish, shawarma (Lebanese kebab, much better than the Turkish version, obviously) and falafels. We also use it in a limited way in sweets. We mix it with carob mollasses to make a nice sweet dip which we simply eat with bread, and we also butter cake tins with it, such as in sfouf, a yellow cake flavoured with tumeric. The Greeks also use tahini in their own way and they make tahinopita, a special pie made for Lent. The ingredient is without doubt Lebanese, or at least from our side of the med. The word itself signifies something that has been ground up, in this case sesame, which are ground as they are to produce tahini. Nothing else is used, pure sesame.

Now my idea as it ended up resulted in a very simple yet tasty dish, which at first glance looks very similar to falafels, but tastes very different. The falafel disks are made from white bread, tahini, salt and sugar, mixed with fennel seeds, with a small bit of water to help it come along. The mixture needs to be strong and not too sticky. As it is already edible, you need to taste it to make sure you have the right balance.
As a guidline:
4 large slices of white bread (not Lebanese bread)
3/4 cup tahini
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 to 1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons fennel seeds

Mix all ingredients except fennel seeds in blender/food processor. Work into a nice not too sticky paste, add the fennel seeds and deep fry in small batches. Make sure the oil is not too hot as you want the inside to cook a bit as well. These fellas will brown very quickly, so remove when nice and golden.

My initial idea was to make a sweet tahini sauce, which is what you see in the photo. I made that by mixing tahini, lemon juice, icing sugar, and water. You need lots of lemon juice and sugar. This completes the illusion that you are serving falafel, but this is also tasty with a simple syrup of sugar and lemon juice, with lots of lemon juice.

Apologies on the not too clear directions, but this is a first attempt. Try it, and taste the paste as you go along and it will not go wrong. A cheat’s recipe for dessert, and makes for interesting conversation!

Orange and Blossom Cordial

Homemade cordial calls back to my childhood, and mom made the best. Dad would come back with boxes full of oranges, which he would have picked up from the local growers, and mom, knowing that there was no way we would get through them, would start the “mooneh”. The word mooneh translates to “supplies”, but is most usually used to indicate the larder, or the winter store with pickles, jams and of course cordials. My brother Fady was a big fan of mom’s thirst quenching cordial, of which she kept several bottles in the kitchen pantry. I remember walking into the kitchen and seeing Fady pull out a bottle from the pantry, pour some in a glass, and add some water straight from the tap, and in his haste, he downed it all without stirring. Before I could say anything, Fady spat out the lot. Those of you who know Fady, know he is a bit like Emile, the gluttonous brother from Ratatouille. Fady had taken a bottle of our own cold pressed, unfiltered olive oil and downed the contents. I have not let him forget that story.

This weekend we went for an Easter visit to Lainy’s parents, who own a fantastic plot of land in Picton, NSW. I’ve tried to grow some vegetable there before, but our visits were not frequent enough, and the land itself needed some serious work, so the yield was low. There are, however, some old fruitful trees that are in desperate need of being taken care of. One of which is a loquat tree (my favourite) which self seeded in the same month I met Lainy, and we take that as a “sign”. Another one is a sorry looking orange tree, around a meter and a half tall, but with fantastic yield. My in-laws are not big fans of this tree, and I have difficulty convincing them that the oranges should be eaten, rather than let go to waste. So I picked some oranges and brought them home with me. I also picked some of the orange blossoms in order to infuse them in my cordial.

orange blossoms from Picton

So once I got home, I cordially recruited Ludwig’s help (as he had made the last batch of lime cordial). The recipe could not be any simpler than this:

Ingredients
4 cups of orange juice
8 cups of boiling water
10 orange blossoms
1.5 kg of sugar (yep!)
1 tsp citric acid (from the supermarket)
The rind of 3 lemons

Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water, infuse the lemon rind and the orange blossoms for 10 minutes. Add the orange juice and citric acid and stir, making sure all the sugar has dissolved. It’s now ready to go, so add some water as desired, and plenty of ice! And it tastes so good, especially with the orange blossoms having infused in there. Very Lebanese!

The finished product, orange and blossom cordial

Sujuk – from Armenia to Lebanon and to the land down under

OK. This is not here just to save face value. I have neglected you. I’m sorry. But hey, I’m back now. Let’s just move on.

I was showing a colleague some blog pix back in December and her comment was: How do you expect people to follow your blog if you haven’t updated in a week… Truth of the matter is, I don’t really expect people to follow my blog. The fact that I have a few visitors each month is taking me continuously by surprise. A recent comment on my blog was chasing me up for a task I had set myself in the first ever post. I obviously have not done any entries on Lebanese breakfasts. But, after a visit to Emma’s on Liberty, I had the chance to get reacquainted with an old favourite: Sujuk. Before I get stuck in, I want to make it clear, this is not a post for the sake of posting. This is the real deal, a full subject matter, so let’s dig in.

Red Sujuk Stockings, probably great for Christmas, with black Sujuk in the background

Lebanon has a fantastic Armenian community who have enriched our cuisine and with whom we have co-contributed to much cross-cultural osmosis. Our fellow Armenians have had a presence in Lebanon for centuries, but the major influx was during the Ottoman empire’s Armenian genocide in 1915 – a very sad event.

But Armenians are a strong and positive people, and they persevered well, and integrated into the Lebanese society where they now have representatives in the parliament. An area of major concentration is Bourj Hammoud, and there you will find some of the best sujuk ever.

All cut up and frying, with no oil.

So sujuk, it turns out, is a semi-dry, spicy sausage that crosses cultural boundaries. It can be found in more or less similar form in Macedonia, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Armenia. The version familiar to me is the latter, and after the visit to Emma’s, I wanted more. Emma’s version of this Armenian specialty is pure authenticity. What left me hanging is the mean, upsettingly small portion.

My recipe based on a traditional version with plenty of onions and fresh tomatoes, made smokey by the sujuk slices

Normally, I would seek sausages out at the butcher’s. This particular one however, has an alcoholic ingredient (red wine or arak) which means none of the Lebanese butchers I know would make it, alcohol being a forbidden ingredient by Islam. So, determined to make my own, I looked around the net for resources and found several. So I took the best bits of all the recipes, and came up with my own. It turns out there are two types of sujuk – red and black. Red sujuk contains red wine and has paprika as a main ingredient, which gives it its color. Black sujuk depends on pepper for spice, with the aniseed hit coming from Arak (the macho Lebanese cousin of ouzo or pastis). Beware, you will be stuffing the meat in freshly bought single legged ladies stockings. So here is how you make it:

Red Sujuk
1 Kilo fatty beef mince (or half beef, half lamb)
1/4 cup finely minced garlic
2 tsp salt
2 Heaped Tablespoons Sweet Paprika
2 Heaped Tablespoons Smokey Paprika
1 Heaped Tablespoon Fenugreek spice
1 Heaped Tablespoon Cumin
1 Heaped Tablespoon Black Pepper, the fine powder type, not the fresh cracked.
1/2 cup of Red Wine, nothing too expensive

Black Sujuk
1 Kilo fatty beef mince (or half beef, half lamb)
1/4 cup finely minced garlic
2 tsp salt
1 hpd tbsp white pepper
1 hpd tbsp black pepper
1 hpd tbsp cinnamon
1 hpd tbsp cumin
1 hpd tbsp allspice
1/2 cup arak

1. Mince all ingredients together for your chosen color in a mincer (or in a food processer).
2. Stuff meat nicely in clean stockings and make sure the meat is nice and uniform.
3. Hang meat for 3 to 5 days at room temperature, less if hot, more if cold.

So, of course, after a week, I had to get everyone over for a sujuk festival.

Stuffed soujouk foccaccia, pre-oven

To cook the sujuk, you need only slice it and fry it dry in a frying pan. The amount of fat within is sufficient to fry it nicely.

For the foccaccia, I used a basic recipe with mozzarella, parmesan, semi-dried tomatoes and sujuk.

The following are questions I had in my mind
1- Is this safe? Should I be hanging meat in the garage? A – Yeah, come on!
2- Will it rot? A – You won’t know unless you try. My batch didn’t rot
3- Will it dry up? A – Yep, slightly, and it becomes harder on the outside, which makes it easy to slice
4- Will it drip as it hangs? A – No
5- How do I know if it has gone bad? A – Evidently, it will smell bad, but the alcohol and salt should preserve it well.

The stuffed foccaccia as an end result.

So, what do I think? Fantastic result, and everyone loved it. None was left over, so that’s cool… I had to buy a few books about sausage making as a result, but that’s another post for another time.

*References
http://lpoli.50webs.com/Sausage%20recipes.htm#DRY
http://www.georgefamily.net/cookbook/16Soujouk.html

Lebanese Breakfast

I remember breakfasts of Labneh, Zaatar, mint, tomato and cucumber with fresh, paper thin markouk bread. On weekends, when time was a luxury we could afford, it would be kishk and qawarma hiding full cloves of garlic in creamy whiteness speckled with shallow fried pine nuts. We burnt our tongues in impatience and never learned to wait. Eggs with sumac were fluffy and crunchy, slowly fried with olive oil in pottery and devoured within seconds with farm fresh home made goat’s milk yoghurt. Every once in a while, mom would send dad down to the baker’s with a variety of containers to be made into Lebanese pizzas and pies. The one for manakish would be full of her special zaatar mix – hand picked mountain thyme, dried and mixed with freshly roasted sesame seeds, sumac and of course, olive oil from our decades old olive grove. Another would have spinach and wild silver beet mixed with onions and used to fill the triangular Fattayer b’Sbenekh w Selek. Then there was Lahm b’Ajeen, mutton and beef mince mixed with onions, tomatoes, pine nuts, pomegranate molasses and spices served piping hot on top of the crispy golden brown pastry. A squeeze of lemon juice was all it needed to become the perfect meat pie. Let’s not get into an argument here.

Dad would drive on missions in search of the freshest produce. On his way back home, he would beep the horn, sending a special message that got us on to our feet and out to greet him. The three boys would help dad carry boxes full of the freshest produce upstairs where mom would complain. On a good day. electricity was only available for two or three hours if we were lucky, and that meant that produce needed to be bought and consumed very quickly. But Dad had a problem. Buying a kilo or less of anything was a strange concept he never embraced; and so mom got busy cooking three or four meals at a time, preserving what she could and handing out the rest to the neighbours, who were all too keen to repay the favour and offload their own husbands’ overzealous shopping habits, undermining mom’s evacuation efforts.

Over the next few posts, I want to cover many of the Lebanese breakfast foods we eat. I will aim to recreate the recipes using high quality raw ingredients sourced locally from Sydney wherever possible . Wish me luck.

(grapes from my father’s garden)