Middle Eastern foods

[kerouac2]

Always interesting when accompanied by photos. I have had at least eleven of these dishes.

Middle Eastern Foods

[onlyMark]

Well. What can I say.
I've not tried number 15, Quwarmah Al Dajaj, the curry.
The majority of them I ate regularly and will make Om Ali as my favourite dessert whenever I can. Number 20, the carp, I've only had once. But in Syria.

(N.B. The top photo of the woman frying stuff (falafel, or known in Egypt as ta'ameya), I'm pretty sure is taken in Egypt (as the falafel she is frying is greener due to being made with fava beans rather than chickpeas) and is taken in the Khan el-Khalili market in Cairo on Gohar Al Kaed alley/street.
I say all this, and it'd be difficult to prove me wrong I suppose, due to about the only talent I have, and that is a very good memory for the details of places I've been a few times. I often navigate by having an near photographic memory of recognising road junctions and, to the wonderment of Mrs M, I am able to remember bumps in the roads. A handy thing to remember when driving in the dark in some countries I've been to.)

Sorry, carry on.

[onlyMark]

One glaring omission, eaten by the tons and tons each day, but not usually available anywhere than Egypt, is koshari. Cheap, filling and superb. Mrs M makes it now as our daughters are addicted to it and I had it made by her in Spain not more than a week ago.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushari

Between the British food thread and Middle Eastern food (thread) now here, I am in heaven. Two of the best cuisines the world has ever seen (debatable opinion, for sure).

[onlyMark]

Just to add a little to this as I have a moment, before I nip out to get my haircut and also to try a new lunch restaurant (life is hard).

A couple more items of food you can easily stuff your face with and are particularly popular are, in no particular order -

1) Maqluba.
The word means 'upside down'. It is mainly a dish that is cooked with meat, vegetables and rice. There are all sorts of westernised fancy ways to make it but essentially it is made in a pot with the meat on the bottom, then vegetables of choice and rice on the top. It is then tipped upside down when served to have the meat come to the top. This is how I am used to eating it -



2) Kibbeh.
There are different regional/cultural/country versions of this but the common ingredients are ground meat and bulgar wheat. They can be baked, fried, boiled or raw but I'm used to the fried version whereby a ball of a mix of ground beef and wheat forms an outer shell, the middle then consisting of spiced ground beef. Apparently popular in a number of South American countries as well –



3) Kanafah.
Again there are variations but is cheese pastry soaked in sweet, sugar-based syrup. Turkey and Greece also have their own versions of it. No calories at all in it. None whatsoever. Trust me. I'm used to this version, more or less –



4) Manakeesh.
This is part of the above article but the usual one in Jordan, often eaten on the go and on the run for breakfast, has no meat. It is just za'atar (hang on a sec about that) or za'atar and cheese –



Herbs/spices –
Za'atar, as just mentioned, is a blend of thyme (lots of), oregano and majoram, often with toasted sesame seeds and salt. In some cases it can contain sumac or sumac berries and the individual recipes can be closely guarded.
Sumac is where the berries from the sumac bush are dried and ground to a powder. It makes for a lemony, tart taste and, depending on country, is added to most things like meat and salads and can be added as a garnish.

Freekeh is a green durum wheat – "The wheat is harvested while the grains are yellow and the seeds still are soft; it then is piled and sun-dried. The piles are carefully set on fire so only the straw and chaff burn, not the seeds. The roasted wheat is subjected to threshing and sun-drying to make the flavour, texture, and colour uniform. This threshing or rubbing process of the grains gives this food its name, farīk or “rubbed”. Finally, the seeds are cracked into smaller pieces so they resemble a green bulgar."

Baharat is just the word for spices and is a general mix of stuff, hard to pin down in exact amounts or details. You can buy packets of it and ground up into containers for sprinkling like salt/pepper. If you can think of a spice, it probably is in there, or not, or maybe. Any combination or inclusion/exclusion and is used for seasoning or as a condiment.

Shatta(h) (my favourite), is a hot and spicy sauce made from chilli and herbs, maybe parsley and coriander. It ranges from reasonably mild to blow off the roof of your mouth and boil your brain. It is used both as a condiment and an ingredient. The variation in heat value is tremendous from place to place and even shop to shop. It is, in Egypt for example, used as a topping to koshari and is home made always rather than bought. The place I regularly used to go to would make a batch for each day and no two days were the same. Best advice is to treat it as though it will cause you pain unless you taste it differently.

[lagatta]

I've had most of those, and of course there are many national and regional variations. I guess one must be immersed in Egyptian culture to like koshari - I've tried it but didn't really like it.

I haven't had that particular lamb dish - I've had whole lamb cadavers more in a Maghrebi than Middle Eastern style, though I imagine that they aren't terribly different.

I'm having taboulé for breakfast - it isn't perfect as my August tomatoes were VERY ripe, so it is a little bit mushy, though I finely chopped a LOT of parsley and mint (the latter from a friend's garden - mint is very invasive). It is good anyway.

The Moudajjarah I've eaten always includes rice as well as lentils.

[amboseli]

As much as I love the Middle East, I'm absolutely not a fan of Middle Eastern/Maghrebian cuisine.

[kerouac2]

I had a Pakistani friend who often made that first dish. He would put ground beef, cardamom pods and chillies at the bottom and then the rice on top, along with however much water was required.

[onlyMark]

Aug 15, 2017 9:45:32 GMT lagatta said:

The Moudajjarah I've eaten always includes rice as well as lentils.

Mudajara(sp?) includes rice (or bulgar sometimes) anyway, no?
Koshari includes rice and macaroni, or it isn't then koshari.

Give me fish and chips one day and an Arabic meze the next, till I die.

[mickthecactus]

They do look delicious Mark. Kanafah looks very much like Baklava.

[onlyMark]

If you substituted the cheese for nuts than it would all taste the same to me, i.e. bloody sweet.

When I was out and about, this would be my usual breakfast (twice to four times a week). Falafel/Ta'ameya sandwich. In Egypt the cost was about $0.25c for what you can see. In Jordan was twice that -

[onlyMark]

Lunch could be a fattoush salad. Sumac giving it a sour taste, but not off puttingly so. With a hummus dip and some flat bread -



Dinner could be something simple like the above Maqluba (upside down meat and rice but with chicken).

After eating all that, the next day would probably mushy peas for lunch and Cheddar cheese and Branston Pickle sandwiches for tea.

[lagatta]

There are many different transliterations of Arabic and related foods; here I most often see the French ones.

Koshari seemed to be a mess of different stuff thrown together to me, but I know that it is comfort food for Egyptians.

amboseli, I'm fond of many (but not all) foods from those parts of the world, but no accounting for tastes. Some seem too heavy, but I could say that about many European foods as well, and their derivations in the Americas.

[kerouac2]

One interesting that I learned recently is that there is a genetic reason that some people can't stand cilantro. Slightly off topic perhaps, except for the fact that Middle Eastern cuisine tends to use lots and lots of cilantro and coriander in a lot of dishes.

Cilantro tastes like soap.

[onlyMark]

This has been mentioned somewhere before, the genetic thing with coriander and I specifically remember it because I suffer(?) from it.
And I'm not alone -
I hate cilantro

[amboseli]

Aug 15, 2017 15:33:35 GMT lagatta said:

amboseli, I'm fond of many (but not all) foods from those parts of the world, but no accounting for tastes.

Well, they use a lot of herbs and seasonings that I'm not crazy about. Cilantro, ginger, harissa, ...
If I have to choose, I think I prefer Lebanese cuisine. It's more 'bland' (neutral) than Egyptian or Moroccan. At least, from what I've eaten.

[rikita]

have had a bit less than half of the dishes in the link, but will use it as inspiration to try some new things when i go to a restaurant ...

as for the cilantro thing - i always wonder, do people in countries where it is very common get that gene that makes you dislike it, too? how do they deal with that, then?

[mickthecactus]

Aug 15, 2017 20:35:01 GMT onlyMark said:

This has been mentioned somewhere before, the genetic thing with coriander and I specifically remember it because I suffer(?) from it.
And I'm not alone -
I hate cilantro

Quite happy with Coriander but I can't stand rocket!

[kerouac2]

Then you probably don't like dandelion either.

[mickthecactus]

Aug 17, 2017 10:11:51 GMT kerouac2 said:

Then you probably don't like dandelion either.

Can't say I've ever tried it. I've certainly killed a few.

[onlyMark]

I used to get a rocket quite often at work.

[bixaorellana]

If someone told me that the only kind of food I could have for the rest of my life would be Middle Eastern food, I'd probably be okay with that.

The one thing I do not care for in that cuisine, though, is felafel -- possibly the one item most associated with it.

The only Middle Eastern dish I know how to make is tabbouleh, which I could eat until the cows came home.

[lagatta]

Falafel is street food, so easy to avoid in sit-down dining. I actually have had falafel I've loved, but there is a lot of crappy falafel - as is the case with many street foods. Think tortillas and tacos in places with few Mexicans or Central Americans...

[kerouac2]

I made falafel for dinner (well, part of dinner) just yesterday. But I have learned to dip it in something to make it more interesting. And also, since I use a mix, I add additional ingredients such as cayenne pepper, garlic purée or sesame seeds to jazz it up a bit.

[bixaorellana]

Full disclosure ~ I don't like arancini, sort of an ott Sicilian version of falafel, either. It's a general aversion to fried stodge.

[lagatta]

Now there are (inauthentic) falafel with melted cheese inside, which really makes them a type of arancini.

[lagatta]

A bare-bones site on Syrian family cooking. www.syriancooking.com/ How I love Levantine food...

[kerouac2]

I doubt that Syrian food is different from Lebanese food.

My favourite falafel mix was from Syria, but it does not seem to be available anymore, I buy the Turkish or Israeli versions now and modify them to my taste.

[lagatta]

Syria and Lebanon were a single entity, which westerners called "Greater Syria". There were many sub-regional dishes even in such a small land area, given the many thousand-years history of the region.

That was not really my point; the site features simple "family" dishes from that part of the Levant and is accessible to non-expert cooks.