Mejadra (rice with lentils and fried onions), p. 120

A friend who has cooked far more from Yotam Ottolenghi's books raved emphatically about this one, so tonight, when I was definitely feeling the winter, I decided to make it.

It's basically a heavily spiced rice/lentil pilaf with frizzed onions on top.

And I kind of screwed it up.

See, I halved the recipe because it looked huge and serves 6 (and "6" according to Jerusalem often feels more like 10; I'd make references to loaves and fishes except that the authors are a Jew and a Muslim).

And then I discovered after I added the rice to the spice mixture that I'd not halved the rice.

Oh, and I swapped the form of three of the spices (ground cumin instead of whole, and cinnamon stick and allspice berries instead of ground).  And I forgot to add flour to the first batch of frizzed onions, meaning they got soggy rather than crunchy.  Oh, and we don't have yogurt, so I cut some sour cream with olive oil and used that instead of yogurt sauce.

And despite all of that, it was still yummy.

I think this would be helped with some parsley or lemon or pomegranate on top of it.  (This feels ridiculous to say because it's one of few in this whole book that doesn't have one of those augmentations.  I still assert that it is true.)  As it stands, yes, it's very comforting, a little one-note, and did less to get me out of my funk than did the baby spinach I wilted and served alongside it.  With, you know, Meyer lemon juice.  And, um, pomegranate.

I think I'm goin' native.

Roasted butternut squash & red onion with tahini & za'atar (p. 36)

I've been meaning to make this for ages; there's been this squash sitting on the counter making me feel guilty.  And this one I hadn't made before.

Unfortunately, I'm still failing to have the right spices.  See, I really thought I had some za'atar in my pantry, and I can't find it.  But za'atar is basically thyme and oregano and sesame seeds, plus sumac, so I substituted all of the non-sumac bits. *sigh*

We used this as a side dish to the end of a chicken I roasted following another famous London cookbook chef: Jamie Oliver's chicken with milk sauce, which is odd, but good.

All told, the squash salad is a good one: the strength of the lemon cuts through the richness of the tahini, and the roasted onions give it a pleasant colour and more complexity of flavour.  I added chickpeas to the salad (largely because of  this, yet a third, British recipe for much the same salad but with raw onion and with chickpeas), and I think it made for a better side dish.

This was good--I'd say it lacked oomph, but, um, I didn't have zaatar.  I'm going to the convenience store / Middle Eastern grocery by the bus terminal now.  *sigh*

Tahini cookies (p. 292)

This is one of the recipes I've made several times from Jerusalem.

It's basically a peanut butter cookie, only with tahini instead.  (And, indeed, the headnote points out that tahini is the closest relative to peanut butter in that part of the world.  This made for a horrendous "let's just use PB instead of tahini" hummus recipe in Slate a few years ago.  Don't make that.  Make the hummus from Jerusalem instead.  We'll get there.)

I'm concerned that making the recipes from this book that I haven't already made is going to be hard due to lack of ease of getting ingredients.  Fresh herbs are in short supply here this winter, it seems, and poaching pears in red wine always sounds great except that there aren't great pears now.  I don't want to fall back on the chicken in cardamom rice, but I do think we'll have lentils and rice with caramelized onions later this week instead.  That one I've not made.

But these cookies?  They're great!  The texture is crumbly, like a good peanut butter cookie, but with that funny oobleck-like tahini compressibility to it as well. And the sesame flavour from the tahini is rich and not at all inappropriate. Better still, you can say, "gosh, I want cookies", and have cookies in 40 minutes.

Recommended.

Mixed bean salad, p. 42

A problem with Jerusalem for me is that I live in Canada.

Right now, it's -11°C = 12°F outside my window, and it's brutally cold this entire winter. It's not warm in Jerusalem either (+3°C = 37°F), but it's better. So making things like the wonderful tomato recipes, or cucumber salad, or eggplant recipes, is tough.

But this recipe was pretty straightforward. Steam some green beans, add lightly roasted red pepper strips, and then top with a warm scented olive oil with fried capers and garlic and some herbs and lemon zest.

It's tasty. I can't get yellow beans in January, nor chervil (can I ever get chervil?), nor tarrago, so this got fresh parsley, dried dill, freeze-dried chives instead of scallions (because I hadn't bought enough), and capers.

It's a little fiddly, and it wanted more capers than I was willing to give it (though maybe I should have?). But it was fine, though I think it'd be better with all of the veggies roasted, and roasted for real, not just for 5 minutes as the recipe claimed was the right amount for the peppers.

All told, a decent start to the project, but not on the scale of the hummus, or the eggplant salad, or the chicken with cardamom rice.  We'll get there.

What is this blog about?

This will be a blog from my 2015 project of eating many of the recipes from Jerusalem: A Cookbook, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.

This book is unbelievably popular, so I can't be the first guy to go all Julie and Julia on it. I promise I'll try to be more respectful than Julie Powell was of Julia Child. Another advantage is that Ottolenghin and Tamimi were actually designing a book for everyday cooking, not the made-for-special-days book that Child wrote. Readers who want an everyday book by Julia: get yourself a copy of The Way to Cook, which is fantastic, and has awesome an awesome crêpe recipe.

Anyhow, I'm dan brown. I'm a professor at the University of Waterloo. People in Waterloo might have seen my blog Eating the Plaza, about the restaurants near our university. (I recently talked with a relatively new prof at Waterloo, who'd found the blog, and was disappointed that I hate all of the restaurants in the plaza. He had to concede that I was right, though.)

Eating Jerusalem will be much tastier, I'm sure.  Welcome.