The Saveur Middle Eastern Slideshow Experiment

This has been a very busy week, and when compounded with a very long commute, I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to try more of the Midde Eastern Food recipes from Saveur's slideshow.  Tonight I made up for lost time with a vengeance.  On deck tonight - Lamb, Artichokes, and Eggplant.

Dinner on the patio

My menu was Lamb Loin Chops with Ras el Hanout and Charmoula;  Fried Artichoke Hearts with Taratur Sauce, and my favorite - Smoked Baby Eggplant with Parsley-Mint-Chili Sauce and hard boiled egg garnish. 

Preparing three dishes and three sauces took just under an hour but the time was worth it.  First, I pulled out my pressure cooker and cooked a half dozen hard boiled eggs in a cup of water - this took about 5 minutes - 2 minutes to come up to pressure and 3 minutes to cook. While they cooked I put 4 baby eggplant on my smoker at 375 degrees, then trimmed the artichokes by cutting off the top 2 inches, and then I sliced them in half so they would cook a little faster.  When the eggs were done, I removed them and let them cool off and I added the artichokes to the pressure cooker along with another 1/2 cup of water.   After coming up to pressure, I cooked them for 8 minutes, and I made the sauce while they cooked.  The artichoke recipe (Fried Artichoke Hearts with Taratur Sauce) can be found here: 

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Fried-Artichoke-Hearts-with-Taratur-Sauce

After making the Taratur sauce, I prepared the Ras el Hanout spice mix. According to Wikipedia, 

"Ras el Hanout is a spice mix from North Africa.  The name is Arabic for "head of the shop" (similar to the English expression "top-shelf") and implies a mixture of the best spices the seller has to offer." 

For my Ras el Hanout mix, I used a recipe from Serious Eats that can be found here: 

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/05/ras-el-hanout-north-african-spice-mix-recipe.html

Smoked Eggplant and Fried Artichoke Hearts

I didn't have lavendar or dried rose petals as called for in the recipe, so I omitted them, and I was also missing the cubeb pepper so I used Aleppo pepper instead. I (sadly) had the other 13 ingredients on hand. My husband hates my spice cabinet because it's as large as some women's shoe closets. The recipe made about 2/3 of a cup of spice mix and I used about 4 tablespoons of that to season two lamb loin chops; I set them aside to come up to room temperature while I started the Chili herb sauce for the eggplant. OMG! That sauce was unexpectedly good!  Mint, parsley, honey, lemon and chili -- this will work on a lot of things, but was especially perfect for the eggplant.  The eggplant and artichokes alone would have been plenty for a great Vegan dinner (sans the eggs).  Saveur's recipe for Charred Eggplant with Chili Sauce is locaed here:

http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Charred-Eggplant-with-Chile-Sauce-Tahini

Searrng the Lamb Loin Chops

As the eggplant fimished smoking, I added the lamb to the smoker for a few minutes while I made the Moroccan Charmoula herb sauce (http://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/moroccan-charmoula). Then I began heating my cast iron Le Creuset skillet, cleaned up my prep space, and unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher.  All clean, Yay!  Lastly, I pulled the eggplant and lamb from the smoker and finished the lamb with a good sear in the skillet.  While it was finishing, I poured a glass of French Vouvray and sat down to this:

The Final Product

Yum Yum Yum!  These recipes are definitely keepers!

Don't Be a Follower

I have a vivid memory of an incident that occurred when I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, waiting in line to buy books at the student union. There were four sorority girls in line in front of me, complaining about how they'd been maligned by a caustic person who claimed they were all replicas of each other (we didn't call them clones back then), with their uniformity of dress, hair, and personality.  The most vocal of the girls went on and on about how they each were so unique!  Why, she was wearing a pink polo shirt with white shorts and had a brown bob,  while her sister was wearing a blue polo shirt with white shorts and a blond bob.  The other two had blue shorts on with green and peach colored polo shirts, and their brown bobs had different lengths of bangs, so if anyone thought they were "Identical" then they were blind fools!

Why do I bring this up now?  Because April 6th was Nowrux - the Persian New Year - and all the food blogs had posts for the perfect Middle Eastern feast.  But did I follow the crowd and make hummus and baba ganoush on April 6th? No! I bucked the trend.  I am the kind of person who bucks the trend. And also the kind of person who lets her foodie email newsletters get out of control and doesn't realize there was even such a thing as Persian New Year.  

This past weekend I was catching up on that email and came across a slide show from Saveur magazine titled the Best Middle Eastern Recipes, containing, in their words, 45 Essential Middle Eastern Recipes:  http://www.saveur.com/best-middle-eastern-recipes

Everything in this slide show looked delicious, and there were a lot of paleo-friendly and vegetarian offerings which work well given all the diet restrictions going on in my household.  I decided I am going to try to make every recipe in the slideshow this month.

Broiling rose petals to dry them out for the recipe

Tonight I started out with the Persian Kuku Sabzi, which I am told translates to roughly Herb Fritatta. I had all the ingredients on hand except dried rose petals - and those are easy enough to make by taking the most fragrant rose from your organic garden and toasting it under the broiler for a few minutes until it releases a beautiful fragrance throughout your kitchen. The addition of ground walnuts, an assortment of chopped fresh herbs, and the lack of cheese give this fritatta a unique and delicious flavor.  It was quick and simple to make, low cal, and healthy.  Eggs. They're what's for dinner - definitely!

Herbs minced and ready to go

The recipe can be found here:  http://www.saveur.com/perrsian-kuku-sabzi-eggs-rose-recipe  However, as I was researching about Persian New Year, I came across another version of Kuku Sabzi from the New York Times which looks even better because it contains an even larger assortment of herbs and spices: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018062-fresh-herb-kuku    I am going to try to make this version in another week or so and I'll let you know how it turns out.

The finished fritatta - garnished with rose petals, chopped parsley and nasturtiums

I also made some sumac flatbread (m'sakhan) found in the recipe for Roast Chicken with Sumac Flatbead (http://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/roast-chicken-with-sumac-flatbread)  and was inspired by the slideshow's Tahini - Beet dip recipe (http://www.saveur.com/tahini-beet-dip-recipe) although I modified it slightly to use up some spicy Peruvian beet salad I'd made over the weekend, and because I didn't have all the ingredients called for in the recipe. Both the bread and the dip were a hit with the hubby and some friends who dropped by.

The whole meal - we ate the flatbread faster than I could photograph it! 

For the beet salad, I had previosly roasted, peeled and diced six medium beets.  I tossed them with a small handful of finely chopped parsley, two tablespoons of Vegennaise, and 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, and ghost pepper sauce (I use Diabo Sauce from Fat Rice restaurant in Chicago; while you could use sriracha or tabasco style sauce, the ghost pepper adds a different and better kind of flavor, and if you don't use too much, the heat can be the perfect foil for the bland sweetness of the beets).  I put about 1 cup of this salad into the blender.  The Saveur recipe calls for tahini but I didn't have any on hand, so I added 1/3 cup of toasted black and white sesame seeds, and the rest of the ingredients called for in the recipe, except the ice:  3 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice, 3 medium cloves of garlic, a drizzle of olive oil to get a creamy texture, and a little more salt and pepper. I blended this all on high speed until the sesame seeds were pulverized, then served it with the flatbread.