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Recipes

Mansef: A Middle-Eastern feast dish

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Arabs cook meat—most often lamb, goat, or chicken—with a variety of aromatic spices and then add yogurt to make an ineffably delicious sauce. The feast based on this dish is called mansef. Recently in my collection of magazine and newspaper clips I came across a late 1960s Americanized version of mansef. Authentic mansef is boiled lamb with sweet spices and yogurt. The Yankified version substituted cream cheese for yogurt, probably because few Americans would eat yogurt during the 1960s, and those who would were unlikely to find it in a grocery store. The flavor is quite lovely…but not having any cream cheese on hand, I decided to try yogurt and also  substitute freshly made beef/chicken broth for the original recipe’s water.

Re-adapting it backward for authenticity and forward for the crockpot, here’s what I came up with:

• about two pounds raw lamb, cut into 1- or 2-inch chunks
• beef or chicken broth
• about 3/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 10 or 12 cloves
• salt and pepper
• a little olive oil
• juice of a  lemon
• 2 containers or more of plain yogurt (about 4 cups; Greek-style is recommended)
• rice
• pine nuts
• a little chopped parsley
• tortillas or pita bread

Season the meat with salt and pepper. Skim the bottom of a large frying pan and brown the the lamb pieces nicely on all sides. Then place the browned meat in a large crock pot.

Sprinkle cardamom and cloves over the top of the meat, and tuck the cinnamon sticks in around the meat. Cover with beef or chicken broth. If there’s not enough liquid, add some water to cover. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into the pot with the liquids.

Place the lid on the crock pot, turn the pot to “low,” and let the meat cook until tender, about four to six hours.

At dinner time:

Prepare some rice—for a large group, you might want to cook up two or three cups of dry rice, which will make quite a lot of cooked rice. Judge the amount of rice you’d like by the amount of meat you’re cooking. While the rice is steaming, gently brown a handful of pine nuts in some olive oil or butter. Watch: don’t let them scorch.

Remove the meat from the crock pot and set aside. Place a cup or so of the juices in a blender, and add about a cup of yogurt. Cover the top and place a towel over the top to protect your hands, in case the hot liquid tries to escape. Blend the ingredients well. Repeat to incorporate all the yogurt into the juices.

If any juices remain in the pan, pour the yogurt mix back into them and stir well to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. If desired, add more yogurt, using the same mixing technique. But don’t turn the heat on under the pan with this yogurt-meat sauce, lest it curdle.

Pile the rice in a big bowl. Toss the meat and toasted pine nuts into it. Then pour the sauce over the rice and meat mixture. Garnish with chopped parsley sprinkled over the top.

Serve this with some warm tortillas or pita. Diners place a bit of mansef into the center of a piece of flat bread, wrap the bread around the meat mixture, and eat.

About the tortillas. They’re not cooked (exactly) when they come from the store. One way to finish them is to dab a little butter on each tortilla, stack them up, wrap them in tinfoil, and warm in a 250- to 300-degree oven while you’re preparing the sauce. Another way is simply to heat a griddle over a moderately hot burner and flip the tortilla on it until the tortilla is hot. Stack them on a clean table napkin or piece of waxed paper and keep wrapped until you take them to the table.

Image: Nickfraser, Mansaf as Served in an Ammani Household. GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia Commons.

Cherry soup

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Here’s something I’d forgotten about, and it’s soooo good! At Costco the other day I came across a bag of frozen, pitted cherries. Also had to buy some wine for a stew recipe, and so had on hand the better part of a bottle of cheap red. Combine these judiciously and you come up with a delicious treat: cold cherry soup.

You need:

• blender
• a sieve, if desired
• one cup or more of pitted bing cherries
• cold water and red wine, combined, to cover
• sugar to taste
• dashes (1/2 to 1/4 tsp) of sweetish spices, such as nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and coriander, to taste
• a few black peppercorns
• dollop of yoghurt, sour cream, or heavy cream, if desired

Place all the ingredients in the blender. I use a fair amount of sugar, because I like the soup to be rather sweet—maybe 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar to a cup of cherries and two cups of liquid. Adjust to fit your own preferences. Cover and turn the blender to “high.” Purée the bedoodles out of it.

When I first started making this soup, I ran it through a strainer after puréeing. This results in a more elegant product, but it’s not necessary for flavor or anything other than looks. Just to eat the soup en famille, there’s probably no need to strain it.

Chill the soup and serve in bowls. I’ve developed a taste for added heavy cream, a very bad habit. Sour cream is also very nice, and a good-quality low-fat yoghurt is just as pleasing but a lot more virtuous. If you’re teetotaling or serving this to kids (speaking of virtue), you can omit the wine and still come up with a good spiced cherry soup.

Tasty fig morsels

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At Costco last weekend, M’hijito and I came across some lovely ripe figs, packaged (as usual) in lifetime-supply quantities. He suggested we split a flat of the things. And then he described this wonderful little treat:

You need

Ripe whole figs
As many slices of bacon as figs
Honey
Feta or other goat cheese

Wrap each fig with a slice of bacon. Fry gently until the bacon is cooked to your taste. Arrange on a plate and drizzle with honey. Garnish with goat cheese.

I tried this for an after-church brunch Sunday morning. Awe-inspiringly delicious!

Because I had no toothpicks and the little metal skewers in the drawer seemed likely to scratch the pan’s nonstick surface, I used cotton string to tie the bacon onto the figs. If you use toothpicks, remember to remove them before serving, so no one gets poked!

Fizzy lemonade

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The other day a craving for something sweet, cold, and bubbly snuck up on me. I don’t care for pop and wasn’t in the mood for an unscheduled grocery-store run through 100-degree heat. But…last summer I froze a bunch of juice from the backyard Meyer lemon tree, in quarter-cup size chunks made in a muffin tin. Here’s the result:

Fizzy Meyer Lemonade

You need:

• about 1/4 cup lemon juice (no need to defrost, if frozen)
• about 1/4 to 1/2 cup orange juice
• about 1/3 cup sugar
• can of club soda or seltzer water
• ice cubes

Put the juice and sugar in a blender and whirl on “high” until well blended. Pour about half of the resulting mixture over ice cubes in a tall glass. Top with fizzy water and stir gently to mix. Makes two or three servings.

I’ve not tried this, but you may be able to substitute lemonade concentrate for the juice and sugar in this recipe. In that case, try leaving out the sugar, since concentrates are very sweet to start with. If this works, then probably about any frozen juice concentrate would be good: you could make your own orange, pineapple, apple, or cranberry juice pop.

Quinoa: Pretty good!

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During the last Costco expedition, I noticed they were offering organic quinoa, a grain I’ve long been curious about. The package suggested preparing it like tabbouleh, something I happen to favor.

First time I fixed it, though, it was breakfast time and things were a bit too rushed to fiddle with slicing garlic and onions and with harvesting herbs and making vinaigrette. One of my eccentricities is that I don’t like milk, and so I don’t at all care for hot (or cold) cereals splashed with the stuff. Oatmeal’s OK, if it’s prepared like pasta as a savory dish, instead of gooped up with milk and sugar.

So… I decided to try something along those lines with the quinoa.

It’s easy to cook, much like regular oatmeal or converted rice: just dump a cup of it into two cups of boiling water, turn down the heat, and let it simmer 20 minutes or so, till the water is absorbed. The result is a nice, fluffy product, light and pretty, with an interesting texture.

I had some sausage that I’d cooked and frozen. While the quinoa was steeping, I reheated that and sliced it into bite-sized pieces. Cut up a ripe tomato. sliced a green onion, chopped some parsley.

When the cereal was finished cooking, I served it up in a bowl with a big dollop of butter on it, and then topped it with all of the above, with a sprinkle of Parmesan. It turned out very tasty! And it really filled me up: I didn’t get the slightest bit hungry until past lunchtime.

Impromptu shrimp curry

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I ate it before I could take a photo of it. Sorry. It deserved a picture.

The other day M’hijito and I went over to the new westside Lee Lee, an Asian supermarket of local fame. While there, I picked up a three-lifetime supply of Madras curry.

If you’ve never tried Madras curry powder, consider seeking it out or making it. So lovely! It’s spicey-warm and…well, the only word I can think of is “mellow.” It’s a deliciously mellow, just slightly hot spice.

Around 10:15 this evening, I was moved to fix dinner. As you can imagine, the bare fact that it was after ten o’clock before I got around to eating reflected a difficult, nay, hair-pulling day. Luckily for you, you weren’t here!

Anyway, with the air conditioning system fixed and an estimate of taxes on Social Security benefits run and a new set of survival figures calculated (*$%$&*#@!!!), bills paid, budget rejiggered, pool cleaned, copy read, more copy left unread, inadvertently dessicated lime tree rescued, associate editor’s new GDU horror story confronted, friend’s woes heard, dog walked, thermostat re-re-re-reprogrammed, and the general hysteria ebbing, I wanted something easy and fast to prepare. Pulled an open bag of frozen shrimp out of the fridge and proceeded:

I had…

• four or five medium-sized frozen shrimp (one serving), defrosted and patted dry with a towel or paper towels
• some leaf lettuce
• a ripe mango (any fruit would do)
• 1/4 lime
• Madras curry, about 1 Tbsp
• about a tsp. of whole mustard seed
• 1 little green onion, coarsely chopped
• a few spoonsful of cooked rice
• a splash of olive oil

Peel and slice the mango. Place some nice leaves of lettuce on a dinner plate and set the mango slices on the lettuce. Squeeze a little lime juice over this mini-salad.

Pour a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan. Warm briefly over medium-high heat. Add the defrosted shrimp and the cut-up onion, a tablespoon or so of curry powder, and a sprinkle of mustard seeds. Cook the shrimp until it’s about done. Add some cooked rice. Stir gently until the shrimp is finished cooking and the rice is warm.

Place the cooked shrimp and rice on or very near the mango salad.

This is a lovely flavor combination. Easy, quick, and minimally messy. Good eating!

🙂