Pureéd beets with yogurt & za'atar, p. 53

This is a roast beet and yogurt dip flavoured with za'atar. It's actually pretty easy to make: you roast the beets, you make the world's least appealing smoothie (beet/yogurt/garlic/chile), and then you add the za'atar, some olive oil and salt, and date syrup (for which I used the suggested substitution of maple).  Then you serve it by topping it with goat cheese, more olive oil, and some hazelnuts (or, in my case, pistachios).

If you've never combined goat cheese with beet, you should try it.  I think the best way to do it is in my favourite beet salad: you roast and peel beets, slice them, and toss them with goat cheese, lime juice, salt, and parsley.  The lime juice acidifies the salad, which makes the pigment in the beets (which is called betanin) especially red, while the creaminess of the goat cheese both gives the dish better mouthfeel and also gives the salad more of a chance to get pink, since the cheese instantly turns colour in the beet.  Plus, I think lime goes better with beet than does lemon.

Anyhow, where were we?  Oh, right.  The Jerusalem recipe.  There's a tedious headnote about a different beet recipe (which is why I didn't feel bad with the previous paragraph), but fundamentally, this feels like Standard Jerusalem Dip Number 15723.  Which is a fine thing, but unfortunately, I only have one of those dips right now, not the three or four that would make for a better meal.

Then again, I made this dip as a side dish with fried chicken.  Why am I complaining, again?

Chicken with caramelized onions and rice, p. 184

I'm sorry we've been on hiatus: I was in the Netherlands (home of patties in grocery stores made out of bugs) (seriously, it's a thing) for three weeks, in NYC for a week, and so on.  It's been a busy winter.

And besides, it's hard to be blogging about food from latitude 32°N when you're in the coldest winter in Ontario history.

In fact, we had a frost last night.

But today, the farmer's market is full of early-spring veggies: ramps and rhubarb, asparagus and garlic greens.  This afternoon's walk was pleasant, perhaps even a little warm.  And though the weekend's real project is this three-day croissant recipe, I have been feeling guilty to you, gentle reader.  Plus, I was craving a little chicken-and-rice comfort food.

This recipe is the canonical one I mentioned in the previous post, which also has links to a pile of other ways you can get the recipe.  You lightly caramelize some sliced onion, start to make a highly-seasoned rice pilaf, and then cook it with some browned chicken parts.  It's served topped with herbs and some olive-oil mixed into yogurt.

In other words, it's crazy-simple comfort food.

So, why is it so good?

Seriously, this is an amazingly tasty dish: the chicken tastes really chicken-y, the rice is beautifully seasoned, and there's a mellowness to the whole experience.

I think the answer is, in part: it's an excuse to use a lot of salt and a lot of fat.

• You fry the onions in fat. 
• Then you brown the spiced chicken parts in more fat.
• This renders fat, in which you fry the rice.
• Then I cooked it in chicken stock, which (since I was making it with the back of the chicken I'd cut up to make the dish), was still in the process of cooking, so I certainly didn't de-fat it.
• Then there's the olive oil in the yogurt.
• The rice is supposed to be seasoned  
• Both the chicken itself, and the rice, are supposed to include a good teaspoon or more of salt.  I'd probably not manage to season the chicken that aggressively, if it hadn't both given a measurement, and also included it as part of the other seasoning (cardamom! cloves! cinnamon!) for the chicken.  

The dish is full of that wonderfully smooth mouthfeel that comes from all that chicken fat and olive oil.  It's pleasantly spiced, but not overpoweringly so.  The chicken isn't overcooked, but does come smoothly off the bone.  And because it's whole spices, different parts of the rice taste differently: here some cardamom, there some cloves.

Highly recommended, of course. 

In this case, I added some of the fresh spring garlic to the onions when I caramelized them, I used dried cranberries instead of the not-easily-found barberries, I used stock instead of water, and I added a bit of saffron to the rice.  Really, nothing that isn't within normal range.  I think this dish would be good with greens in the pilaf, particularly stronger-flavoured ones like chard or kale.  One of the times I made it, I put carrots in, which went well.

Happy spring!

Chicken sofrito (p. 190)

The canonical chicken recipe from Jerusalem is the casserole with rice and cardamom and spices.  This is the one with the NYT video, the Epicurious post, and so on.  You mention this book, and people start extolling the virtues of the chicken and rice casserole.

So tonight, I made a different one-pot chicken meal from Jerusalem, the chicken sofrito.

What is interesting to me is that this is a dinner lots of us have had.  It's chicken with 40 cloves of garlic.  I first had it in my 20s (I didn't eat meat from 1992 to 2000), and I've brought it to potlucks and eaten it in other people's houses.  I think everyone has their little tricks for it: you can play around with the cooking liquid (my preference is unfermented apple cider), and the seasoning (I like cinnamon), and if you choose to add veggies (sometimes spinach or chard).  And you can use different starches as well (my preference is the easy-peasy oven-cooked polenta by Paula Wolfert, which takes 1.5 hrs to cook, but so does chicken with 40 cloves).

What do we get in Jerusalem?

• Brown the chicken parts first?  Yes!
• Cooking liquid? Lemon juice.
• Seasoning?  Paprika and turmeric.  Also, a trivial amount of irrelevant sugar.
• Other veggies?  A quartered onion.
• Funny garlic cooking trick?  Deep fry it!
• Starch?  Tater tots (OK, "cubed potatoes") that you deep fry and then toss into the chicken stew an hour into the cooking process.

It's exactly as tasty as you think it would be.  But exotic?  No, not especially.  It might be enhanced with the pomegranate seeds that wind up in so many other Jerusalem recipes.  Certainly a fine dinner for a frigid February Sunday.

Cheating: Baci di dama from Food52

I live in Canada.  It's February, and I'm spending part of the weekend at home with no car.  We've had record-breaking cold (today's high -14°C = 7°F) for much of the month.  I might like to be cooking as though I were in Jerusalem (today's high +9°C = 48°F), but that requires planning.

Instead, I've made these amazingly tasty Piedmontese cookies, which are a really delicate nut shortbread filled with chocolate.  I'm probably going to Hell for this, but I substituted almond meal for the ground hazelnuts.  You won't tell, will you?

These come from a series in food52 that focuses on regional Italian food, which I've been enjoying for a while, though I rarely cook from it.  Actually, food52 is how I first learned about Jerusalem, so we're still on theme.

Rover with baci di dama

Oh, and Rover is especially barnacle-dog today, so I figured she belonged in the photo as well. 

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.