cookrookery

I’ve written elsewhere about the difficulties I have with breakfast. Simply put, food before 11am makes me nauseous. There have been exceptions to this. The buffet at the International Garden Hotel in Narita, Japan, was so exciting I grazed for two whole hours. Miso soup is just good at any time of day. And I am fond of cold pizza, or, when in Thailand or China, congee with the works. Roald Dahl recommends half a papaya melon with a whole lime squeezed over it, and so do I.

Perhaps I do like breakfast. I just don’t like normal things for breakfast.

Today, I remembered a non-normal thing for breakfast I first made six years ago and then forgot about: lablabi, a kind of chicken soup with chickpeas and spices, which I read about in The Age (Australia’s only serious newspaper). The author described people lining up to consume bowls of this dish first thing in the morning at Moroccan markets. I duly made it, and it was indeed fine. I even used real homemade chicken stock, which improves anything.

The problem is, upon consulting that oracle of all truth, wikipedia, I learned that lablabi is not Moroccan. It’s not even from an adjacent country. It’s Tunisian, and it isn’t served for breakfast, but for dinner. There are two possible explanations for this. Either Moroccans like to eat Tunisian dinner dishes for breakfast, or the author was bullshitting, as food writers do. Can someone who has actually visited either of these two countries give me a ruling on this?

In the meantime, this is a kickass breakfast.

Lablabi

(for two)

3 cups chicken stock (homemade is ideal)

1 can of chickpeas

1 Tb harissa (a Tunisian chili paste, available as a powder in the West)

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp salt

Two large slices of sourdough bread

1/3 cup freshly chopped parsley

1/3 cup freshly chopped cilantro

1 Tb chopped capers (absolutely essential)

2 soft-boiled eggs

Olive oil (fine and interesting quality, please)

Simmer stock, chickpeas, harissa, cumin, and salt for 15 minutes. Tear up the bread into chunks. Place the bread, the herbs, and the capers into two soup bowls.

Scoop an egg from its shell into each bowl, then ladle soup over and drizzle with olive oil.

It occurs to me that if you substituted vegetable stock, you would have my first vegetarian recipe! Unless you consider eggs to be meat, that is. Hmm.

I interrupt my regular program of heavy meat-based dishes to bring you something more appropriate to the 100º weather outside my window. Much as I love lamb broths and spicy chicken wings and braised pork and so on, by evening my apartment is so disgustingly hot it’s as much as I can do to blanch a bean. So here is a delicious salad which is a whole meal in itself.

It’s supposedly Salade Niçoise, but I can tell you right now anyone from Nice would be disgusted with me for claiming that. Salade Niçoise is one of those dishes, like bouillabaisse, which no one will ever agree upon. But don’t feel bad – wikipedia defines ‘salad’ as a dish which a) may include vegetables, pasta, legumes, meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, sauces, dressings, noodles, gelatins, nuts, and croutons,  b) may be served hot or cold, c) may be served at any point during a meal. Thanks for narrowing that down, guys! In other words, salad is anything I say it is. So this is Salade Niçoise.

Dan’s Salade Niçoise

½ can of good quality tuna

2 eggs, hard-boiled and halved

A bunch of cherry tomatoes

A handful of tiny black olives (Niçoise, in other words)

2 Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled until just tender and sliced

A handful of green beans, blanched in boiling water but still crunchy

½ red pepper, sliced

½ yellow pepper, sliced

Dressing:

½ cup olive oil

1 crushed clove of garlic

4 anchovy fillets in oil

Sea salt and pepper (freshly ground)

Arrange the ingredients artfully on a plate. Chop the anchovy fillets and mix with the other dressing ingredients and drizzle on top.

A word about the tuna: I use Quinault Pride albacore tuna, because I can get it. It is loin-cut, preservative-free, caught and packed by Quinault Tribal Enterprises on the Taholah reservation in Washington, and it is good. Unfortunately, their website seems to be down, but if you live in Washington, you should be able to seek it out.

You might be surprised how many people have tried to answer this question. Did you know there’s a “Complete Idiot’s Guide” to cooking foods from the Bible? I didn’t, until I stumbled upon it in the cookery section of the library. I immediately opened it, seeking an answer to my personal interest, “what was Jesus’s favorite food?” I was disappointed. I did receive details about Jesus’s feast with the Pharisees, but nothing about what he thought of it, except that he didn’t get along with the Pharisees. Googling the question later produced a range of answers ranging from the profane to the hilarious, but no serious leads. Further investigation provided me with such books as Cooking with the Bible, Biblical Food, Feasts, and Lore, and Foods Jesus Ate and How to Grow Them, as well as the Idiot’s Guide. Yet none could answer the question.

I suppose the obvious answer is bread. Bread is the staff of life. When Jesus is kicking around the desert the Devil says something like “hey, if you’re really the Son of God, what about turning these rocks into bread?” Jesus must have thought pretty highly about bread if that was what the Devil thought he would most like to turn rocks into. And then of course there’s the Last Supper. And all those tortillas… but I still hold that the evidence does not speak as to whether Jesus loved bread above all other foods or was just good friends with it as a symbol.

Intrigued, I continued my research into the food preferences of Ascended Masters with the Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, and had little more luck. Arguably, food is more important in Buddhist ritual than in Christianity. The Bible makes a big thing about food restrictions. I’ve nothing against this, and some of these restrictions I can get behind. Leviticus specifically prohibits the eating of ferrets, for example, a tradition that has been carried all the way to the present day (“warning – this food may contain traces of peanuts, shellfish, and ferrets”). Buddhists, however, like to make offerings of food, Buddhist monks collect alms in the forms of food, and so on. Often these offerings are oranges, as seen in many restaurant shrines. Does this mean Buddha’s favorite food was oranges? Or did Buddha, perceiving all as illusion, have no preferences by definition? It is said he died of food poisoning, though the food in question is up for debate. The Mahayana tradition has it that Buddha ate a poisonous mushroom, and thus died in the same manner as the Roman Emperors Claudius and Charles VI. However, the Theravada tradition say that Buddha died from eating bad pork. I think I’m going to compromise, and say Buddha’s favorite food was the truffle.

I had much more luck with the prophet Mohammed. We know without a doubt Mohammed’s favorite meal, because he says so in a number of hadith, including this one, concerning his beloved wife Aisha:

“The superiority of Aisha over other women is like the superiority of tharid to other meals.”

Tharid, also known as tashreeb or tahgrib, is a chicken stew served over torn up bread. The bread slowly absorbs the stew.

So at the end of all my research, I am left with an image of Jesus, the ascetic, saying “no, no, I’ll be fine with just bread.” And Buddha saying “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so” (okay, so that was Douglas Adams). And finally Mohammad: “Bring on the tharid!”

Tharid, Tashreeb, Taghrib

Serves 2

(adapted from Annia Ciezadlo, in her essay They Remember Home, about Iraqi refugees about to be settled in Texas, of all places)

Splash of vegetable oil

3 cloves garlic, smashed

2 small onions, roughly chopped

2 medium waxy potatoes, peeled and quartered

1 bay leaf

1 Tb curry powder

½ Tb ground turmeric

½ Tb kosher salt, plus more to taste

4 skinless chicken thighs

1 19-oz can chickpeas, drained

2 pieces flat bread, such as Iraqi al-tannour, naan, or pita

1 lemon, quartered

½ Tb dried sumac

Heat oil in a pot over medium heat. Add garlic, onions, potatoes, bay leaves, curry powder, turmeric, and salt. Cook, stirring and scraping bottom of pot occasionally, until onions and potatoes are golden, about 10 minutes. Add chicken and 1 ½ cups of water; stir to combine. Bring to the boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, until chicken is tender and cooked through, 20-25 minutes. Add chickpeas; cook for 5 minutes more. Taste the stew and season with more salt, to taste. Line 2 bowls with torn pieces of flat bread. Ladle stew over bread. Squeeze a wedge of lemon over each bowl and sprinkle with sumac.

As you see this recipe requires flatbread, which you can generally buy at any supermarket nowadays. I’m not a baker, but I am sick of the generic flatbread at my supermarket, so here’s a recipe for a flatbread you can make in a household oven. It does help to have a baking stone, or, in my case, the inverted cast-iron bottom of my tagine, which works just as well.

Iraqi Pita

(adapted from Maggie Glezer, A Blessing of Bread)

This pita is very large and has no central pocket, which makes it ideal for sopping up stews, but it becomes stale pretty quickly. This will make four large pitas – if you freeze the leftovers, they will keep a few days more and need only to be warmed up under the grill.

1 tsp dried yeast

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ cups warm water

1 tsp sugar

½ Tb salt

1 Tb vegetable oil

Mix the yeast with half the flour. Slowly pour in the water and mix until smooth. I am assured this goes a lot easier with a mixing machine. Let the slurry stand 10-20 minutes, until it has begun to ferment and bubbles are appearing.

Add the sugar, salt, and oil, and mix until everything is dissolved. Add the remaining flour and mix until the dough is very smooth, about five minutes. Or it would be five minutes, if I had a mixing machine. The dough should be extremely wet and soft, impossible to mix by hand. If it is at all firm, add water 2 Tb at a time until it is wet again.

Place the dough in a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise until it has doubled in bulk, about 1 ½ hours.

Heavily flour a baking pan. Turn the dough out, using plenty of dusting flour, onto a well-floured work surface. Trust me, you’ll need all the flour. Cut it into four equal pieces and round them, then roll them in more flour. Place the rounds back on the baking pan and wrap with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise another hour.

While the dough rises, place your baking stone or upside-down cast iron pan in the oven under the broiler, and preheat the oven to 550º, or whatever the highest temperature it can manage is.

After an hour, turn off the oven and heat the broiler (the pitas need to bake from both sides, the iron below and the broiler above). On a lightly floured surface stretch out one of the chunks of dough until it’s about 1/8^th inch thick.

Place it on a baking sheet, and put the baking sheet on top of the heated iron or baking stone under the broiler. Bake it about 5 minutes, but be careful not to overbake, because it will burn in the space of a minute. Meanwhile, stretch out the next pita. Wrap the finished pita in a towel and put the next one in the oven.

I served this with a bulgur pilaf. As you can see, a feast worthy of a prophet.

Last year I had the privilege of visiting the fair land of Nicaragua, where I endured hellish bus trips on the worst roads on Earth, was caught in monsoons, harassed by soldiers who didn’t believe Australia is a country, flooded out of my bed, and got smacked in the face with a chicken. Good times. I also ate a bunch of things I’ve never eaten before, which is always good enough reason to go somewhere.

Let’s start with breakfast.  Typically this was gallo pinto, which is the national dish of both Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I wonder if they have custody battles? Gallo pinto, which means ’speckled rooster’ for some untranslatable reason, is red beans and rice cooked separately and fried together. Of all the foods in Nicaragua, this is the one I miss most. Of course, anyone staying longer than two weeks in Nicaragua would probably laugh mockingly at that. It is eaten every day, and often all day. Here it was served with egg, tortilla, avocado, and cuajada, which wikipedia charmingly describes as an “almost cheese-like product.” Cuajada is compressed salty milk curds and tastes like an extreme version of feta.

The second most important food to mention is tajadas. These are thin slices of plantain, deep fried to make sweet chips. Any meal that doesn’t contain gallo pinto contains tajadas. Of course, most meals contain both. These chips are popular from Haiti to Peru and with good reason. Deep fried banana is tasty. This meal I ate after going swimming in a volcanic crater lake, heated by fumaroles, while frigatebirds wheeled overhead. Wouldn’t be dead for quids, would you? On the side is beef fried and served with raw onions and tomatoes, which brings us to our next key component of Nicaraguan cuisine: the fritanga.

A fritanga is a roadside stall with a heat source and sometimes a choice of menus, but not often. The main foods you will find at a fritanga are fried meat (beef or chicken), gallo pinto, and tajadas. Beef and chicken are the two main land animal proteins I found in Nicaragua, and I don’t think I ever saw them prepared any way other than severely fried. There was a market selling more exotic cuts, and I did see folks peddling armadillo and iguana, but these don’t seem to make it to restaurant menus. A pity.

Chicken is definitely a big deal in Nicaragua. And why not? They are cheap, plentiful, tasty, and like to travel by bus, which definitely makes them easier to handle than cows. I was somewhat surprised to only ever encounter one method of preparation, but perhaps that is due to the fritanga way of life. Stews take too long, and consume a lot of fuel. At one restaurant in the tiny town of Rio Blanco I ordered pollo al vino, expecting Central American coq au vin, and got fried chicken in ketchup. My wife Leslie ordered a different chicken dish and also recieved chicken in ketchup. It’s a good thing both chicken and ketchup taste good, but it gets a little depressing after a while.

One particularly special meal was prepared for us on the top of a mountain in the Reserva Natural Cerro Musun. After a sweaty day of hiking through the jungle, our guide Vicente prepared some limon dulces, sweet lemons:

This was followed by a simple and very satisfying meal of beans, eggs, rice, and a corn tortilla make from corn ground before our eyes.

This was doubly impressive to me because all the cooking for the rangers and us three tourists was done on this heat source:

Eventually, we made it to the Caribbean, where the food really began to impress. First off, take a look at this picture of a young fisherman taking his catch home:

Is that a fish in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? Seafood is a big deal on the Caribbean coast, and why shouldn’t it be, when lobster in butter is so prevalent?

And of course, there is the famous Caribbean stew known as rondon. Rondon is coconut and fish stew, indigenous to Nicaragua but also found in Costa Rica. The word ‘rondon’ is Creole English for ‘run down’ and either refers to the cooking technique (laying the fish on top of the vegetables while it steams so all the flavours run down) or the need to ‘run down’ any ingredients you can find. In any case, it’s more of a concept than a recipe, requiring only four things: fresh seafood of some kind, vegetables of some kind, coconut milk, and a pot to cook it in. I wish I could have tried it while I was in Nicaragua, but unfortunately the minimum order seems to be for twelve people and requires a day’s notice. To make up for this disappointment, I ate crab and conch stew instead.

Conch is remarkable, but then so much shellfish is. It has a fine-grained mealy texture and that simultaneously revolting and delicious shellfish tang.

All in all, it is the seafood you should seek out should you visit Nicaragua.

There are definite advantages to living in a small country with the Pacific on one side and the Carribean on the other.