Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Baklava

No feast would be complete without dessert, and for many Middle Eastern feasts, this means baklava.  It is probably the most well-known of the many dessert options, and the ingredients are inexpensive and widely available.  One of the appeals for me of serving baklava on special occasions is that it is such a unique dessert.  Obviously, it is not a cake, pie, or cookie.  It also does not fall into the category of "frozen dessert."  It is a filled pastry, but it is a completely different creature from a creme puff or chocolate-filled puff pastry.  It takes less than an hour of hands-on time to make at home, and like many Middle Eastern dishes, it can be made the day before the event.  You can also purchase baklava in many bakeries and grocery stores.

For years, that's exactly what I did.  I purchased my baklava along with my pitas and hummus to go along with the other dishes that I was making.  Phyllo dough scared me, and the dessert looked complicated and time consuming to make.  Moving to a small town a few years ago forced me to change my opinion.  The only baklava here is in the fancy pastry section of the local bakery and costs as much for two tiny pieces as a whole tray of it in any other place that we lived.  So I rolled up my sleeves, looked up half a dozen recipes, and went to work figuring it out.

Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemons

One of the things I love most about Middle Eastern cooking is that so much of the food is made with healthy, fresh ingredients.  With the obvious exception of pitas, desserts, and anything made with phyllo dough, the grains are usually whole.  In Middle Eastern dishes, the vegetables are plentiful, the herbs are fresh, and the flavors are exotic combinations of spices that by and large, you already have in your pantry.   (And if you don't, most of them are easy to obtain at a regular grocery store.)

The other thing that I love about Middle Eastern cooking is that most of the dishes can (or should) be made or at least mostly prepared ahead of time.  This makes it ideal company food.  A few hours of food preparation time the afternoon or evening before the event can yield a menu that requires only about half an hour of hands-on cooking the day that the company is coming, leaving your hands free to wipe off counters, set the table, and fix your hair before guests are due to arrive.  (Bedhead is one of those iffy things.  It might make it look like you are such a fabulous cook that you had time to hang out in bed all day before tossing this feast together, but it could also make you look harassed and incompetent.  So, go fix that hair.)

Recipes for a Middle Eastern Feast: Beef Phyllo Rolls (Burak bi Lahm)

Family reunions are a feature of American life. When families are spread out all over our nation (a five day drive coast to coast), it prevents regular family time except for that glorious day (or week) during the summer or during the holidays when everyone gathers to catch up, show off the grand kids, and eat copious amounts of food.  Even if most of your family lives within a two hour drive of Grandma's house, family get-togethers are a treat--a time for remembering and sharing and passing down things that shouldn't be forgotten.  It's a time for heritage.

Food is part of that heritage.  The Mattson family reunions of my youth seemed to feature typical American fare dotted with the occasional traditional dish from the Swedish/Welsh heritage we all shared.  Hoagies, tuna salad, and egg salad sandwiches would be piled on plates and set down on one end of a picnic table along with the bucket of KFC chicken that someone who had just flown in that morning had picked up on the way over to the park.  There were jello salads and green salads, fruit salads and pasta salads.  And then there were the obligatory bowls of something that I have dubbed the Mattson Potato Salad--the magical concoction that no one had a recipe for but somehow could be produced identically by at least four of the aunties and adult cousins besides my mother.  It wasn't a real reunion without it. 

Similarly, it wasn't a real Solomon family reunion without a big bowl of Tabbouleh sitting next to the pile of hamburger patties that one of the uncles had been grilling. 

Easy Italian Bread

As with so many other areas of life, America has a rich tradition when it comes to baking.  I think that this is because American culture draws upon the traditions of so many other cultures.  Here in America, we make everything from fluffy white Italian and French style breads to hearty rye breads from Germany and Eastern Europe.  We make bagels, bread sticks, and buns.  We do dumplings, tortillas, and pitas.  We make sweet breads and savory breads from all over the world.  The best breads, however, come from the home kitchen.

I learned to make bread as a teenager.  I wish that could romanticize that it was because of some deep human instinct or some other such nonsense.  The truth of the matter, though, was that I decided to learn to make bread because I had this empty spot on a goal sheet for a church youth program and "learn to make bread" seemed like the least obnoxious of the various options.  It was also the least expensive by far of any of the cooking options, which pleased my mother.  You can make a whole lot of different kinds of bread with just a handful of basic pantry ingredients.  Sure, you can make expensive bread--every category of cooking has its outliers.  The German bread that I worked on last year had several cups of seeds per batch.  That set us back a bit.  But as I said before, there are hundreds of recipes for bread that call on the baker to use just a few basic, inexpensive ingredients.

The Bubble Solution

Almost all of our snow melted today.  One day we had half a foot covering everything and the roads were a sheet of ice, and then the next... whoa!  I don't think spring has come yet to our corner of the globe, but it sure has in other places.  Spring means outdoor play and outdoor play means... bubbles!

Bubble solution is a quick and easy thing to make at home.  I love this recipe because the addition of sugar (isn't that a funny secret ingredient?) makes the bubbles more elastic and last longer than bubbles made with just diluted dish soap or shampoo.  To make wands, twist pipe cleaners into loops.  You can also use straws, strawberry baskets, slotted spoons, and just about anything with a hole in it to make bubbles.  Use your imagination.

Bubble Solution
1/3 cup dish soap or baby shampoo
1 1/4 cups water
2 tsp sugar
1 drop food coloring (for fun and to help you identify the mystery liquid)

Combine ingredients and pour into an unbreakable bottle (like a large vitamin bottle or tub).  You can use it straight from the bottle or pour it into a pan for young children to use.

Vegetarian Black Bean Soup

Disney is very generous with their recipes.  I can't think of any other business that employs so many top chefs and hands out recipe cards with such wild abandon.  (Notice that there are no Disney recipes in the Top Secret Recipes line of cookbooks.)  This is good news for home cooks because it means that we can recreate beloved favorites, restaurant quality meals, and try new mouth-watering dishes many miles away from Disney's theme parks and resorts.

This recipe, from Shutters at Old Port Royale at Disney's Caribbean Beach resort is one of the easiest to recreate at home.  It's one of my favorites of the hundreds of recipes that I have tried from the web pages with Disney recipes and the Disney cookbooks in the last year for several reasons.  First, it's relatively inexpensive.  (Most of the handful of recipes that we haven't tried yet use cuts of meat or seafood that are either hard to procure in our little college town, expensive, or both.)  Second, it's fairly easy to put together.  And finally, for a vegetarian dish that is very, very good for you, it is also very tasty.  This soup got seven enthusiastic thumbs up (well, okay... six and a half) and has made several repeat appearances.  It even got taken over to a cousin of ours, a student at the local college, who managed to develop pneumonia last summer.  It's just that good.

Cardamom & Cinnamon Buns

The family of one of my childhood friends owned a cinnamon roll shop when I was in high school.  The rolls were fluffy, huge, and covered... no, smothered in icing.  Warm, they were absolutely fabulous, and they were the sort of after school snack that was certain to put you in diabetic shock.  I kid you not.

I love cinnamon rolls.  What I don't love is the difficulty eating them.  The modern American versions seem to be meals unto themselves--too large to pick up without the greatest of difficulty and so covered in icing that by the time you are finished eating one, you are so sticky that you need another shower.  Using a knife and fork barely helps with that problem.  But they are so... wonderful.   They smell like heaven.  Spicy and sweet, they transport you into a new realm of calm, gooey homemade goodness.  When you eat one, the world stops for just a moment and you are back in your mother's kitchen, perched on a stool, taking a break before jumping back into the burdens of real life.

Enter Lotta Jansdotter's recipe for Cinnamon Buns.

Tuesdays with Dorie

I loved the idea in the movie Julie & Julia of taking a cookbook and trying out every single recipe.  As I have said before, cooking for my family had become a chore, so making such a goal sounded a little more intellectually stimulating than what I had been doing previously.

I decided in January of last year to tackle my collection of Disney cookbooks.  I have all of the books that they have put out with recipes from their theme parks.  (I really had no interest in their cookbooks with "cutsie" themed recipes that go with their movies, etc., just the recipes from the fabulous restaurants at their parks.)  I've probably plowed through about 2/3rd of most of the books now, and will post some of my favorites later.  In the mean time, I was trying to come up with a new challenge, and I think that I found one Dorie Greenspan's website.  

I joined a bit too late to start this Tuesday, but I will be participating in the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group.  This time around, they will be tackling Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking with Julia: Savor the Joys of Baking with America's Best Bakers. You can check out the group website here.  This week the group is working on the recipe for Chocolate Truffle Tartlets.  One of the hostesses, Spike, has posted the recipe here.  The next round of posting will be for the March 6th recipe for Rugelach.  I hope you check out my post about it, then.

Onion Lentil Soup

It's been a busy week.  We are getting our oldest son ready to go out on a two year adventure, and there has been a flurry of purchasing, packing, mending, and assorted appointments in the last few weeks.  You probably have those busy times, too.  Times when even regular home chores seem to take a back seat to cannot-be-missed events (and preparation for those events).  The laundry gets backed up (and that's a whole lot of laundry at our house!), everything but the most basic necessities go by the wayside, and meals get simplified down to menu items that take very little prep time to put together.

It's times like these that I really, really remember how much I like soups and stews.  Twenty minutes of chopping and opening of cans--and that's about it.  It may take an hour of simmering spread cut into two or three bits, but then you can squeeze in another load of laundry.  (Yeah... because that's really what you are going to do with an extra half hour away from the stove, eh?  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) The fact that lentils are in this soup is just an added bonus.  All of that good protein, fiber, and vitamins... yeah!

The Test Kitchen: Coconut Lentil Soup Recipe

Lentils have two advantages for the home cook.  First, they are super inexpensive for a recipe ingredient that is both filling (the fiber) and power packed with nutrients (add rice to the mix, and you have a complete protein for a fraction of the cost of meat).  Second, they cook up really fast. These two factors mean that lentils frequently make an appearance in dishes that are both quick and easy.  (College students and families on limited incomes, take note!)  Of course, that's not always the case.  Some lentil dishes require horrific amounts of chopping.  Some require you to cook the lentils separately along with three other pots of this or that, all to be poured over a fifth thing at some point.  And then there are the lentil dishes that call for expensive and obscure ingredients.

Heidi Swanson's recipe for Coconut Red Lentil Soup is both quick and relatively inexpensive.  It is packed with flavor, but it is not so hot that your average family member will balk.  I made a few adjustments to the recipe for our family to use, but you can certainly follow the link to the original recipe.  One change I made was to use regular brown lentils rather than the red ones called for.  The red ones are pretty (as in the photo above), but they are also harder to obtain in small college towns out in the middle of nowhere--as well as being slightly more expensive.  And frankly, there will be very little change in the flavor of the dish.  Second, I left out the raisins.  Most of my family members hate raisins with the heat of a thousand suns.  I kid you not.  My husband refers to them by a rude term that is NOT appropriate at the dinner table.  And third, rather than using the Madras Curry Powder that Heidi suggested, I used a Garam Masala curry blend. 

Valentine's Day Breakfast: Raspberry Pancakes

  The Valentine's Day Chicken makes an appearance at our house every year, leaving tiny boxes of chocolates and conversation hearts for all of the good girls and boys in the Cromar household.  And if that isn't enough, Mom makes fabulous holiday food.

A confession:  I adore holidays.  Their existence makes the rest of life, a series of endless repetitions and routines, bearable.  I mark them on the calendar, big ones and small ones,  and plan decorations, activities, and treats accordingly. 

This year's Valentine's Day was a good excuse to try out a new recipe for Raspberry Pancakes.  (The original recipe is at TheKitchn.com, here. I loved this recipe.  It had all of the heartiness of whole wheat combined with the tasty, tartness of raspberries mixed in.  A couple of notes:  I didn't have plain yogurt on hand, so I used some leftover light sour cream, which worked just fine.  Rather than using the blender, I used my egg beaters in a bowl--this was to save on bowls.  I just sifted the dry ingredients over the top of the wet and then folded them together all in the same bowl.  I also decided against cutting them into heart shapes, as cute as that would be, because I'm not a super big fan of waste. 

This recipe got seven big thumbs up.  Even my picky eater came back for seconds... and thirds.  It was a great start to the holiday.

The Bored Home Cook

I love good food.  Who doesn't?  Good food can take the form of the quiet breakfast for two or the boisterous dinner for seven.  It can be a savory soup, a tangy punch, or a warm and crusty loaf of bread.  It can be a holiday spread, a family reunion picnic, or the group birthday cake for all of the cousins with summer birthdays to share.  I love it best when it is inexpensive and doesn't take all day and several obscure or expensive gadgets to prepare.  I am the home chef... the home cook.

I come from a family of folks (men and women) who get ribbons at the State Fair.  People in my family pass down recipes in binders and slipped into programs at funeral services.  People in my family hoard recipes like people in other families hoard... well, you get the idea.  Still, I don't consider myself a foodie.  I have no aspirations to take professional level classes (although, no doubt, I could certainly benefit from some), open my own restaurant (though for the record, it would be a bakery), or publish a collection of my favorite recipes in a format other than a three-ring binder for my own family members to use.  Frankly, most days, I am not sure that I even like cooking.  The necessity of churning out two to three meals a day for a large family (7!) for a couple of decades now has turned cooking more into a chore than a thrilling challenge for the mind and the senses.

So why a food blog?