Global Recipe Project

Wow, it is hard to find the time for creative cooking with a toddler..whew! Tonight's menu includes Chicken Kabsa. The national dish of Saudi Arabia. It's essentially chicken and rice, but the Middle Eastern version. Who doesn't love chicken and rice? Especially when it's made with cardamon, coriander and black limes. Yes, black limes. The black limes were an intriguing yet elusive ingredient. I traveled all around town to specialty spice shops looking for these little beasts. I finally located a small Middle Eastern market about 40 minutes from my house and sent Tony on a mission.   He came back with small bag of dried, black limes and a report that the market made very delicious shawarma sandwiches. Double win! We invited a few friends over and the Saudi Arabian feast began. Chicken Kabsa 1 cup of basmati rice 1 whole chicken cut into 8 parts 2 tablespoons sunflower oil 1 large tomato, diced 2 bay leaves 1 chicken bouillon cube 1 onion, diced3 garlic c

Who doesn't like Italian food? Really. Anyway, we jumped ahead to Italy because I wanted to try out my pasta maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid. What I failed to realize, (until the dough had already been made, rolled, and prepped) was that I do not own the pasta cutter attachment. This meant that I had long paper-thin sheets of dough that were cut by hand. Oh well. It was fun and more importantly, it was absolutely delicious.  I used a simple recipe for the pasta dough. 2 cups of flour, 3 eggs, dash of salt. Make a well in the mound of flour and mix with your hands. Kneed until your wrists hurt. Set aside for a half an hour then process through pasta roller attachment. Cook. Eat. Done. It was slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. You can find the recipe I used here . I also made some turkey meatballs (not Italian) and everything was phenomenal. Even the uncooked pasta was fabulous. Trust me I know. M (our resident toddler) kept sneaking up to the counte

Since it was a high of 107 today and I spent the better part of the afternoon in the pool, I wasn't super thrilled about having a ridiculously carb-heavy meal of cepelinai. Oh well. Cepelinai are potato dumplings filled with ground pork, beef or veal. They are then drowned in a bacon, sour cream sauce. Hearty. Although all the recipes I found called for "grated potatoes" this is a lie. If you grate potatoes then you will get fine angel-hair like strands of potatoes and they will not mix well and when boiled will fall apart. Instead, you need to pulverize the potatoes. Ingredients:        Dumpling Mixture: 4 lbs Idaho potatoes, peeled and finely grated pulverized 1 lb Idaho potatoes, peeled, boiled and riced 1 teaspoon salt, more or less to taste            Meat Mixture: 1 pound ground pork or 1/3 pound pork, 1/3 pound beef, 1/3 pound veal 1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 large beaten egg           Gr

Middle-Eastern food makes me happy.  The play on savory/sweet makes my tongue tingle and belly smile. Tonight is Pakistan. I know. We've been gone for a while. Okay. A very very long while. However, we had a kid and were learning how to live with another human being in the house. We think we have the hang of it now so we decided to re-start the recipe project. Tony relinquished the job of picking a country from the jar in favor of baby M. She picked Pakistan and I decided to make Chicken Chapli Kababs. It was delicious. The Middle-Eastern version of turkey burgers, but better. And, with chicken. I loosely followed the recipe here. Baby M, Tony and I loved it. Heidi's Rating: 7 out of 10. Delicious. Tony's Rating: 7 out of 10. Yum.