Ginger Carrot Soup: Where'd That Come From?

In Beirut, February brings cold, dampness, illness, and unreasoned arguments from otherwise bright people that the cold and damp are alone responsible for the aforementioned illness. However stupid this idea is, I do feel a strange sense of camaraderie with these boobs since, almost in spite of myself, I still think that eating soup when sick or cold is kind of therapeutic.

I also get little thrills from stumbling onto soups that I would never have thought possible or at least advisable - as in the case of today's subject. In theory, this soup makes little sense. Who uses carrot as a base, for Christ's sake? But it not only works, it's easy and probably kind of good for you if you go easy on the fatty stuff.

Since I'm nursing a sinus infection that makes my head feel like a moldy, stomped-in pumpkin three weeks after Halloween, I'll keep this short and relatively civil. Also in spite of myself.

A word on ingredients: if you use withered little carroty wraiths, the soup will suck. Make sure your roots are turgid, virile and sweet. I use lebneh (Greek Yogurt) because it is always in my fridge and is cheap here. You might want to use something else, like a splash of heavy cream or maybe some half and half. You're a smart kid, I trust your decision on that one. You can add more of the spices if you want, I didn't want to scare you.

Ingredients:
5 large carrots
1 medium sized potato
1 large onion
2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 garlic cloves
3 tbsp butter plus 1 of olive oil
2-3 cups water
3/4 cup lebneh (greek yogurt) or some sort of creaming agent
2 bay leaves
1 tsp ground dried ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg (fresh grate it for nerd points)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp safflower
1 tsp celery salt
salt and pepper to taste

The Process:
1. Cut up your onion and garlic, grind your ginger and put it in a bowl, then peel and cube the carrots and potatoes and put them together in a bowl. Mix the spices together in a little bowl for a quick toss in.

2. Melt the butter on medium heat with some olive oil - when it's hot, add in the onions, garlic and ginger. Let it cook down for a bit, making sure the garlic isn't burning. I know you're not supposed to add the garlic just yet, but it's not going to cook for long.

3. When the onions are sweaty and clear, toss in the spices and bay leaves and stir in, followed quickly by the carrots and potatoes. Stir it together, then add the water (just to the top of the vegetables). Cover and cook for about 15 minutes until the potatoes are soft.

4. Put about 4/5 of the soup in a blender with the lebneh, reserving some of the carrot and potato chunks in the pot for texture. REMOVE THE BAY LEAVES, but reserve them to add in again later. Blend it up, then transfer it back into the pot, adding the bay leaves and salt to taste. Cook it on low for about ten minutes.

5. Turn off the heat and let it rest a bit (never serve soup scalding hot, you miss out on so many flavors), then add fresh pepper to each bowl as you spoon them out.

Serve this as an appetizer, a main course, or whatever. It's delightful leftover and tastes really good with chunks of fresh bread dipped in it.

Mexican Rice: Not Actually Brain Surgery (also Mexican base recipe)

Thus begins a Mexican food trilogy. As I'm cooking this in Beirut, I'm not shooting for accuracy here, so let's not get snooty about this - it tastes good, which is all that matters.

Mexican cooking typically takes more attention than effort. In fact, like all good peasant cooking, it basically involves chopping a combination of tomatoes, onion and garlic, putting them in a pot at various times with fat, other condiments and spices, and letting them stew until they form a delicious mush. It's a proven fact that the closer Mexican food looks to something that has already exited your body, the better it will likely taste going into it.

The roots of Mexican rice go back to the Spanish conquest and importation of Spanish rice into Veracruz in the 1520s. Fortunately for the bloodthirsty Spanish hordes, the climate was ideal for the cultivation of this particularly thirsty plant, which, of all the grains, is definitely the biggest pain in the ass to grow. Since the Spaniards couldn't get Saffron for their meals, they used local ingredients like tomatoes to make the rice taste less unappetizing. From this blossomed the most popular side dish to leave untouched on your plate in the history of Mexican cuisine.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is actually easy to make. But allow me to offer three tips:

1. Make your base beforehand
2. Fry your rice
3. Don't fiddle with it.

So what's this "base" of which I speak? Basically, it's blended salsa, which you can make in quantity and freeze or eat like salsa. Here's what I do:

Ingredients:
1 large onion
4 tomatoes
1/2 red bell pepper
1-2 jalapenos (serranos also have a nice flavor if you like heat)
5 cloves garlic
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tbsp Mexican oregano
2 tbsp minced cilantro
2 tbsp olive oil
lime juice
salt to taste

Process:
1. Chop up the vegetables, seeding your peppers and tomatoes. Combine the onion and peppers and putting the tomatoes and garlic in separate bowls.

2. Soften the onion and pepper mix on medium heat in some olive oil, then dump in your spices. Stir up a bit in the oil to free up your little aromatic molecules then add the tomatoes. Cover and let cook down a bit.

3. After 15 minutes, turn off the heat and let it cool, then toss it into a blender, adding the cilantro, garlic and lime juice and puree it all. Taste it for proper saltiness, and put it aside - the flavors will change as everything mixes together. Use it for salsa, in guacamole, or as a base for your Mexican dishes. It's quite tasty.

Now onto the Rice. At this point it's really freaking easy.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups short grain rice (as sold in creepy bins constantly touched by unwashed child hands in Food City, or use Basmati. Definitely not Uncle Ben's style parboiled rice)
1 1/2 cups of Mexican base
1 small carrot, finely cubed
1/4 cup of canned corn plus a little of the juice
<2 cups of good chicken broth or water if you're boring. Just kidding. I use water usually.
3-4 tbsp vegetable oil or lard (coat bottom of pan)
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1.5 tbsp chili powder
salt
a squeeze of lime juice

Steps:
1. Heat oil in a pot on medium heat and throw in the rice. This will prevent it from getting all gooey and starchy when you cook it down. If you don't do this step, your rice will suck and dingoes will carry off your first born, no matter how old he or she is.

2. Add in the base, carrots and chili powder and stir it around to mix. It'll start bubbling a bit, at which point add in the water or broth, corn and the vinegar. Stir it, wait for it to come to a boil, then cover and turn down to a simmer. It should cook for about 15 minutes this way. If the heat is too high, you'll boil off the water and have hard rice. If this happens, add more water. If the heat is too low, you'll get mush. So try to keep an eye on things.

3. Now leave it alone.

4. When the water boils down to where you can't see it on top of the rice anymore, grab a few grains from the top and taste them. If they're still pretty uncooked, add a splash of water and cover again. If not, cover it and let it cook until it stops steaming under the lid - for extra flavor, let it cook a bit longer to slightly burn the bottom. Trust me.

5. Cover for 10 minutes, then squeeze some lime juice on it and fluff it (stop it, I know what you're thinking) with a fork and use a spoon to scrape the bottom of char and congealed tomatoes. This is flavor, don't fear it. Cover again for a few minutes.

Serve with beans, tortillas and a main dish. It's delightful.

That, sir, is no tortilla

Is what I would say to the stack of wretched flour tortillas that pollute the 1 square foot "Mexican" section of our local supermarket - if I was a crazy person who talked out loud to food items in public, rather than merely cursing them in private. Which is totally sane, right?

Tortillas are by far the most maddening things to buy in Beirut since it costs roughly $4 to obtain 6 bland, crumbly tortillaesque discs that in the end are mostly ornamental since actually trying to eat them would ruin the delightful Mexican dinner that had taken two hours to prepare. I actually threw out one of these 70 cent disgraces after I decided that the quality was even too poor for use in a breakfast burrito.

So out of laziness and necessity - my two constant kitchen companions - I decided to make my own this week to save myself a trip of 100 yards to the store to buy real ingredients.

But frankly, I'll never go back. Once you learn what actually goes into tortillas, you'll likely never buy them again out of sheer indignation, unless you try this recipe and somehow suck at it (for shame).

Ingredients:
3 cups of flour plus more for rolling
1 1/2 teaspoons of salt
1/3 cup of oil (I use vegetable oil, you should use melted lard)
1 cup of very warm water

That's it.

Now check this out:

Instructions:
1. Combine the oil, water and salt in a big bowl.

2. Stir in flour to form a sticky dough.

3. Flour a flat surface and tear off 2-3 inch wads of dough, forming into a ball and coating with flour.

4. Smash down into a disk, and using a rolling pin for its intended purpose for probably the first time in your life, roll it out as round and thin as you can get it (it won't be very)

5. Set aside on a plate, repeat until the dough is gone.

6. Heat a large flat pan to high medium heat and put your first tortilla on. Wait until it starts to bubble nicely and flip after about 30 seconds more or less and repeat. Both sides should have nice, brownish to blackish contact marks where it touched the pan and look vaguely like a tortilla.

This makes about 8, and should take about 20 minutes unless you're a total spazz.

Kishik. No! I'm not insulting you, it's Lebanese Tomato Soup

I'll be honest about this, as I far too often have been in my blog postings. This isn't really a Lebanese thing as far as I know, except at the Byblos restaurant in Tempe, Arizona. In fact, when I talked to our friend Samia who runs a homestyle Lebanese food place in Beirut, she said she can't serve tomato soup because nobody will eat it. However, as an American, I have a primal need for soup and was curious about making my own tomato soup, so I threw this together a few years ago and have been happy with it since. Also, "kishik" is fun to say and it sounds very similar to a colloquial Arabic term meaning "your vagina."

The problem is, Kishik itself is a totally disgusting concept. In fact, it's so gross that I typically trick people into liking it by describing its amazing flavor before revealing that it's actually dried, fermented, strained yogurt ground up with bits of cracked wheat (called burghol). In the stores, it's sold in unfortunate little clear bags, and looks like something you'd scrape off the bottom of a parakeet cage. Though people across Mount Lebanon make it, it's typically associated with the Druze community in the Chouf region. It's actually a brilliant way to preserve milk, which was especially important in the long winters in the mountains when you couldn't easily get to warmer areas to buy food and had to stock up and wait for spring. The wheat provided carbohydrates and B vitamins, while the lebneh (strained yogurt) was good for protein and calcium - and since it was basically a powder, you could keep it in a jar under your bed and it'd do just fine, though it might make your bed smell kind of like sour cheese.

As appalling as it is, on manaeesh (soft, puffy breakfast flatbread) with cheese and olives, it's a thing of beauty. Granted, the manaeesh sit out on the baker's shelf all morning waiting for you to order them, at which point they put them back in the oven for a few seconds to freshen up, but they still generally taste amazing. The little bakeries mix it with oil, thyme, tomato and onion and cook it up a bit - producing a rich, creamy, slightly gamey tang that I'm going to miss in my bones every day I'm outside of Beirut.

Fortunately for those of you who couldn't get kishik if you really wanted it, my recipe doesn't actually call for it. I substitute Lebneh (Lebanese strained yogurt), which you might know as Greek yogurt, which also makes it creamier and more delicious. You can actually make Lebneh for a fraction of the price of the store stuff if you take a strainer and a paper towel filter, fill it with a good quality plain yogurt and let the whey drain out overnight into a bowl - which you then discard (the whey, not the bowl). Or, if you're impatient, just squeeze it out in a paper towel or cheesecloth.

You can buy zaatar, which is basically thyme mixed with sumac, salt and sesame seeds, at any Middle Eastern market worth its milh (little Arabic joke there) or just use regular thyme - though it won't be quite the same.

Kishk Soup
5 very ripe red tomatoes (6 if you're using little Romas)
1 large yellow onion
5 cloves garlic
1/4 c cracked wheat (bulghur)
1/4 c olive oil or butter
1/2-1 cup water
3 bay leaves
2 tsp zaatar or thyme
salt
3/4 cup lebneh (Greek yogurt)

Step 1:
Chop up your onions and tomatoes and put them in separate bowls. Make sure you remove the tomato seeds, which are gross and dopily called "roe" because they look kind of like fish eggs, though to my knowledge tomatoes don't have to spawn upstream to produce it. The easiest way to do this is dig out the core/stem head with a knife rather than just cutting off the top, then squeeze the guts out in the garbage. Smash and mince the garlic and put it with the tomatoes.

Step 2:
Put the olive oil or butter in a pot and turn it on medium heat. When your fat is hot, add the onion and let it soften and get clear, then add in the tomatoes and garlic. Let the tomatoes cook out their juices to form a nice broth, then add the spices, bay leaves, wheat and water. Cover it and let it cook on low heat for about 30 minutes, then turn off the heat and let it cool a bit.

Step 3:
When it's cool, add the lebneh (yogurt, if you've not caught on yet) to the blender REMOVE THE BAY LEAVES and then pour in your soup. Blend it until smooth, then transfer back into the pot, add back the bay leaves and cook on very low heat for about 5 minutes, salting it to taste.

The best way to serve it is with pieces of Italian bread sliced thin, drizzled with olive oil and toasted until slightly charred on the edges in the broiler.

Caramelized Onion, Brie and Bacon Turnovers

I'm not sure if people combine these ingredients regularly, but after eating this I think they should definitely start. The only reason I even attempted this was that 1) we had brie, bacon and phyllo dough, 2) Tam likes brie, 3) it seemed like a lazy thing I could make while holding Eli over a hot stove.

Of course I'm joking about that last part. He spent most of the time rooting around on our kitchen floor trying to find old bits of food, dead bugs, hair and other disgusting things to put in his mouth.

If I could pick one downside to this dish, it's that it's horribly fattening. If I could pick two, it's that it also has several steps that need to be done before you get started, so you can't be as lazy as I'd hoped. Alas.

Since I kind of made this up, I'll not go into the history of Brie or cheese, though noted dick Charles De Gaulle once quipped "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?" More to the point, who would want to? Though France is famed for its culture, it seems to have congenitally poor taste, so I suppose it should be no surprise they wound up with the likes of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy, who looks kind of like an Oompah Loompah without the spray tan. But I digress.

On to the Recipe. Don't buy expensive Brie, nor should you buy "Farmer John's Brie and Party Spread." Use your head, and maybe shop at Trader Joe's or someplace like that where it's hard to buy bad cheese. Also, for my sake, use good, smokey bacon, which will make your toes curl in this recipe. TJ's has a good applewood smoked variety.

Ingredients
10-12 oz of Brie
phyllo dough or puff pastry sheets
3 strips of bacon
1 onion
1 some sweet brown beer or some moderate red wine (a Syrah or Cab would do nicely)
olive oil
an egg
a nice, sweet apple
a head of fresh roasted garlic (I'll show you how in a forthcoming post)
salt, pepper

You should have a brush and a baking pan with parchment paper. USE PARCHMENT PAPER.

Step 1:
Chop up the bacon into little squares and cook it on medium heat until done but soft, reserving some of the fat for your caramelization process, or chuck it all if you want to eat healthfully. But let's not kid ourselves, if you're making this, you've already resigned yourself to swinishness for at least one meal, so go for it. Remove from the pan and set aside for now.

Step 2:
Thinly slice the onion into half rings and then slice into smaller bits to make it easier to eat inside the pastry. I like to cut off the top and root of the onion, chop it in half longways and peel off the skin, then slice little rings from the head to the foot then chop from the right to the left to get a quick dice.

Cover the bottom of the a small saucepan in olive oil and/or bacon grease and turn the stove on to low-medium. Add the onions and let them slowly caramelize, only stirring every now and then (resist the urge to meddle!). When they're 3/4 the way done, pour in a good dose of the beer or red wine and let it reduce, which will give your onions a wonderful depth of flavor. Continue to caramelize until they're dry - if you want, douse them again with booze for a thicker reduction. Salt and pepper to taste.

When the onions are done, remove from heat, toss in the bacon, and set aside. They'll turn a gooey brown color and taste like angel farts, which is just what you want.

Step 3:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Take a double stacked sheet of phyllo dough and lay it out flat on a dry surface - it should look like a square. Slice up the brie and form a triangle of cheese in one of the halves of your phyllo square with it, leaving room at the edges. I say triangle, since you're going to fold the dough from corner to corner to form a triangular pocket - if you're having problems conceptualizing this, rotate your square of dough 45 degrees and smack yourself in the head with a pan, you dummy.

Pile your onion-bacon mix on top of the cheese and smash some of the roasted garlic cloves into it.

Step 4:
Take the egg and beat it thoroughly.

Brush egg on the inside edges of the dough to help seal your little turnover, then fold the empty side over the full one. I don't know why I had to explain that to you, but bear with me. Transfer your turnover carefully to the parchment covered baking pan and paint with egg until it's nicely covered, then slice a few slits in the top.

Bake on 400 for about 12 minutes, remove and serve immediately with sliced apples (which go great with it) and maybe a nice sweet potato puree.

The Valentine's Day Meal Par Excellence: Chinese Noodles and Chicken

Beirut is a uniquely rotten place to spend Valentine's Day. Most restaurants offer a "special

menu" that costs 50% more than usual for the same awful food, people blow tons of money on roses, cutesy knicknacks that would give you diabetes if you looked at them for over 30 minutes straight, the former prime minister was blown up 7 years ago today, and the weather is typically at its dreariest in February.

But what better way to liven up today than with some Chinese food? I'll not get into the history of Chinese cuisine because I don't want to spend the next 15 minutes poking about on google, but suffice to say that this is not what one might call "authentic." Though one could easily acquire bits and pieces from our foreign supermarkets to remedy this, to buy them I'd have to sell one of my kidneys or Eli, so I'm going to keep with the traditional American style of adding things that I have handy.

Fortunately, if you have the essential items, you can sex it up with any number of exciting ingredients that you fortunate many can buy in the U.S. like they're toilet paper. I must admit that this is also a bitter note since the toilet paper here is merely recycled sandpaper.

Ingredients:
1 pound of chicken breast (which cuts better than thighs)
1/2 pound of Chinese egg noodles (use good ones, spaghetti makes your meal taste like you're at the food court in the mall)
1 onion
1 red bell pepper chopped in pretty strips
1 1/2 cups of shredded cabbage
1 cup carrot chopped thinly
a good amount of corn starch
3 tbsp canola oil

Goodies to consider: mushrooms, little corns, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, etc.

For the Sauce
2 tbsp oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
3/4 cup light soy sauce
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp sweet pepper sauce

This is a three parter. Don't let this throw you, just do your prep work before you put anything on the stove and you'll be fine. Chop up the veggies and throw them into a bowl. I like to cut off the top and bottom of the onion then slice it into long thin strips for the aesthetic value, but do whatever gets you off. Mince the garlic and ginger and put them aside. In fact, the only thing to hold off on is the chicken, which you should slice up after the sauce is going to keep from contaminating anything with salmonella - unless diarrhea and vomiting is your kink, food poisoning is not a good way to celebrate Valentine's Day.

Part 1: Noodles (the easy part)

Boil water, add noodles. When they're no longer hard in the middle (but not too soft), remove and throw into a colander. Reserve. If you fail at that, may God strike you from the Earth.

Part 2: Sauce

While the noodles are going, heat the oil and then toss in the garlic and ginger. After about a minute, pour in the remainder of the items, turn down the heat and let it all simmer for about 10 minutes to thicken, then turn off the heat and let it sit for a bit.

Part 3: The green stuff and meat

The veggies should have been cut up by now. For shame.

Once the sauce is going and you feel assured that you're not going to burn it to the sides of your pan, turn your attention to the chicken. You can freeze it a bit to make cutting easier, but it's no problem either way. Cut it at a 45 degree angle to the grain, which will make it taste and look nice and soak up sauce wonderfully. Put about 1/2 cup of corn starch in a bowl and add chicken chunks to it until they're coated, which will help thicken your sauce when you get it going.

Heat the oil in a large, deep pan and chuck in the starched up chicken, resisting the urge to idly turn it over too much until it's cooked through. Once it's done, add the rest of the starch, the vegetables, and the sauce. Stir this around for about 2 minutes, scraping the bits that have adhered to the bottom of the pan, then add the noodles and stir to coat. After about 30 seconds, turn off the heat and you're ready to serve! It's best if the vegetables haven't been cooked to oblivion.

I recommend drinking heavily during this process to enhance the romance.

Bread Crumbs: Why Buy 'Em?

Actually, the answer to that question is "because they're cheap, and why the hell not?" However, as the molehills that are the little luxuries in life so frequently grow into mountains of longing and/or deprivation due to absurd price markups and/or rarity here in Beirut, I learned how to make my own seasoned breadcrumbs since when I need them I can't find them, and when I find them I can't afford them, and if I bought them they'd probably be filled with weevils anyways. (Such is life)

Making them is fortunately quite easy - all you need is an oven, a cookie tray, some old pieces of bread, something to mash the bread up with, and whatever spices you choose to add to it. If you don't want to use the oven, good luck standing next to the toaster for the next 30 minutes.

Might I add that if you don't own a mortar and pestle, you need to acquire one immediately. They're useful for so many things in the kitchen, and the pestles would also make a nifty club in a pinch - such as the zombie apocalypse, since you know you can't just cut one of those suckers with knives. But I digress.

A note on your bread choice: use anything you want, but if you have the type that has unnecessary chunks of chaff and wood and other such offal, remember that that crap won't mash up and will be part of your crumbs. Also, life's too short to get your fiber through your bread.

Ingredients:
5-6 Bread slices (or a loaf sliced thinly - the thinner the slices, the faster they're ready)
1/2 tsp salt
pepper
basil
oregano
thyme
rosemary
etc. (all to taste)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to around 425. Since our Lebanese oven has an inscrutable numbering system that ranges from 300 degrees (position 1) to 900 degrees (position 3) with bizarre gradients in between, I crank it to about 1.2 and let it heat for a bit. The actual temperature isn't all that important, you just don't want to be waiting for an hour or to pull out a tray of bread shaped bits of carbon.

Arrange the bread neatly, haphazardly or however on the tray, as long as they're not really touching each other. After the oven is hot, stick the tray in.

Wait about 7 to 10 minutes, or (like I do) until the bread starts to emit a slight burned odor. Peek in and test one of the slices. It should snap in half and crumble away nicely. If only the outside crumbles away, leaving you with an uncooked center, you've screwed up and have to throw it all away and start over. Ha! Just kidding, just leave it in the oven a bit longer.

**Note: If/when you burn the toast beyond usefulness, don't immediately put it in the trash, as this may start a fire**

When they're done, remove the bread and crush it into tiny grains using the mortar and pestle - or through some other, more lengthy means. Or a shorter route, like a food processor, if you roll like that.

Toss in the spices and mix well - taste it to make sure it's to your liking, then use and freeze the leftovers, which appear to keep indefinitely without going stale.