A few months ago, a beautiful little joy came into my family’s life. Maiyar Al-Zoubi, my husband Ameir’s new baby sister, was born in August.

When Baby Maiyar came home, we had to keep the other girls busy, of course. So Maryam and I helped them paint a big, colorful banner that said: “Marhaba Ahlan wa Sahlan Maiyar! Welcome, We Love you!”

We had a great time with the banner – I really recommend doing this when you need to keep six little hands busy. It kept the girls amused and occupied for hours. It was relaxing for Fatimah, who loves art and helped paint a little bit, too. Maryam and I traced out the letters and divided them up equally between the girls (so that there would be no “She got more than me!” fights.) Each girl got one capital letter and several lowercase ones, and Maryam and I did the rest. It was also a great way to teach the girls about mixing primary colors to get secondary colors.

This soup is named after Maiyar, because I took it to the hospital while Fatimah was in labor. I wanted something nourishing and subtle – nothing too overpoweringly flavorful.

This sunset hued soup is smooth and heartwarming, perfect for cold winter days (which seem to be continuing on FOREVER). It freezes really, really well, so it’s perfect to make in advance. I pack it in two-serving sizes in a ziplock bag and lay flat to freeze.

Ameir also calls this “Taiyyaba’s Butternut Squash Soup That’ll Knock Your Socks Off.” The pictures are from when I made this at Thanksgiving (made ahead, frozen, reheated and kept warm in the slow cooker until dinner) and fancied it up with a drizzle of cream on top. There is actually no cream in this soup, but the texture will make you think it does!

Winter Squash Bisque

1 medium or small butternut squash, diced
3 carrots, diced, or enough to make equal parts butternut squash and carrot
1 onion, diced
1/2 – 1 tsp sugar
1 – 2 cloves garlic, minced or diced
1 can canellini beans, rinsed
1 – 2 cans diced tomatoes
about 1 quart of chicken or vegetable broth or stock
1 tsp cumin
1/2 – 1 tsp coriander powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/4 – 1/2 tsp cinnamon
salt and black pepper

Put the diced squash and carrots in a big bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and season with the spices. I put much less in this soup than I would for a curried vegetable soup. Originally, it was to give Fatimah (and through her, baby Maiyar), something flavorful but not too spicy – but now I realize that it really lets the naturally subtle flavor of the butternut squash come out. I added just enough so I could lightly smell the spices. The cinnamon adds a beautiful semi-sweetness – I really suggest trying it. Cinnamon is used in a lot of Morrocon dishes with red meat (which is often cooked with pumpkin – so this is a very well-tested flavor profile!)

Spread the carrot and squash onto a lightly oiled cookie sheet and roast at 450F for about 7-10 minutes, then turn over and roast the other side for the same amount. In about 20 minutes total, depending on how small you’ve cut the vegetables, they should be soft enough to smoothly poke a fork through.

At this point, turn the broiler on and give the vegetables some color. This part is not necessary, but it adds another layer of flavor.

While the vegetables are roasting, heat some olive oil in a pan and add the onions. (Just the onions!). For this soup, I caramelize them. Stir to combine the onions with the oil, then spread in a single layer. Cook over medium-low heat for about 5-10 minutes, then sprinkle with sugar (brown or white) and cook for about 20 minutes.

After about 15 minutes, you can add the garlic too, since we’ll need it for this soup. While we’re caramelizing, might as well get some sweetness into the garlic as well! You’ll see the onions start to get golden brown and very soft. Taste as you go and get them as dark as you want (or have time for – truly caramelized onions can cook for an hour or more. See here and here.)

Once the onions are sweet and caramelized, add the white beans to the pot. Also add the diced tomatoes. If you want the soup more tomato-flavored, use two cans. Let the beans and tomatoes simmer till the beans are tender, about 15 minutes.

Add the roasted vegetables back into the pot. At this point, you’ve got a thick stew to eat over couscous, with some grilled steak. Stop here, if you like.

Pour half or more of the vegetables into a blender. Add 1/2 quart of stock and blend until smooth. You can leave it half chunky, or blend it all completely smooth. Add more stock until it is the consistency you like it. I usually end up using the whole quart of stock.

That’s it! Roast veggies, cook onions, cook beans, puree. How easy is that?! I’ve even roasted the veggies the day before and just cooked the rest up the day of serving. If you dice the vegetables beforehand and keep them in the fridge, this soup can be on the table in 30 minutes. Freeze it in ziploc bags for a hot dinner on a cold day. When you reheat, you might need to add more stock, so have a little extra in the fridge (or you could use milk for something creamier).

For a long time, I was misguided. I have repented my ways and am attempting to make amends.

Yes. I’m talking about radishes.

I really used to dislike them – too crunchy, too accrid on my tongue. To own the truth, I still can’t eat a big chunk of radish, especially if it’s very spicy. But when they’re thinly sliced into a salad like this one, these crispy red and white root vegetables are absolute perfection.

In France, radishes are eaten as an after-school snack, dipped into coarse salt and soft butter. The simple combination of those flavors – radish, butter, salt – inspired this beautifully quick salad. Ameir and I liked this so much that we ate the whole bowl of it, and I went back to the store the next day to buy two more bunches of radish. And yes, we ate all of that, too.

This is a technique more than a recipe. I didn’t make exact measurements, but was just tasting and admiring colors to see how much of an ingredient to add.

The parsley compliments the crunch and pepperiness of the radish. Altogether, the two make a pretty strong flavor profile. Enter bread, butter, and cheese.

The salad is piled on top of buttered and toasted sourdough toasts. I suppose you could make croutons out of them and eat the whole thing from a big bowl. The toasted, buttery bread provides another kind of crunch, but a little warmth and softness to counteract the possible harshness of the radish and parsley.

The cheese is the simplest but most important part, I think. I picked a classic syrian cheese, which has the light flavor of ricotta but the texture of a harder buffalo mozarella. I don’t mix the cheese in, but leave it in big crumbles on the side to pop into your mouth in between bites of salad-atop-bread.

The salad is dressed very simply – olive oil and balsamic. The former provides a fruity sweetness, the latter a sweet-tart tang.

Recipe after the link (more…)

If anyone knows me, Sara, or Ayesha, you know that we’re each obsessed with food. If you put any two of us together, the effect is compounded. If you put ALL THREE of us together – there is an exponential explosion of food.

That’s what happened when Ayesha came down to a Raleigh for a friend’s wedding. We had been planning what to make for weeks beforehand and finally settled on a high tea so we could make a lot of different little things. We spent all day cooking up a storm.

Also, our cameras got to visit each other. All pictures in this post are taken by me, Ayesha, or Sara, on one of our cameras. Whoever was the closest to a camera and had the least flour on their hands took the picture.

The menu was as follows:

Savories
Chipotle Grilled Shrimp and Mango Kabobs
Roasted Vegetable and Fontina Paninis with Chipotle Mayo
Mini quiches – bacon and cheese, spinach and cheese
Fruit and nut salad with homemade candied walnuts and raspberry-balsamic vinaigrette.

Sweets
Scones with lemon curd and cream
Mini tarts with vanilla custard and strawberries
Jam thumbprint cookies, assorted flavors
Chocolate truffles

Awwwww yeah baby. And the insanity behind making all this food….let’s get started.

Firstly, the salad. I saw the recipe for making homemade candied walnuts on the Tiny Kitchen and we wanted to try them. The process seemed simple enough – melt sugar until it turns brown, add butter, mix in walnuts. Easy, right? Simple raspberry vinaigrette – easy peasy!

Deception. Lies and slander.

Thus also began the trek of Sara running back and forth from her house (across the street) because we kept forgetting ingredients. We almost wrote an epic poem. Thankfully, it all turned out well after multiple tries!

Well. Let’s let the pictures tell the story. Click the first on the left for the lightbox gallery. Make sure to read the captions.

Then, there were the phenomenal chipotle grilled shrimp and mango kabobs. Sara wanted to try a tropical fruit with the shrimp, and mango seemed perfect. I’ve also now gotten Sara and Ayesha hooked on the wonders of chipotle-in-adobo. We mirrored the chipotle in the kabobs with chipotle mayo in the roasted veggie sandwiches. We roasted eggplant, zuchinni, red bell pepper, and red onions (the latter with balsamic vinegar) and then made them into paninis with fontina cheese.

We made two types of quiche – one with a really delicious halal bacon that Ayesha brought from Maryland, and the other with spinach and cheese. Ayesha put little tart dough circles into my mini muffin pan, filled with the different flavors and egg (dough still raw), and baked.

These were relatively low stress after the spinach-caramel and exploding vinaigrette fiascos.

I had made Ina Garten’s Jam Thumbprint cookie dough the night before. It’s a cross between a sugar cookie and a shortbread – more like the latter….i.e. it’s phenomenal. Sara and I filled the cookies with strawberry jam, dulce de leche, and chocolate chips (because Musa wanted chocolate ones). The strawberry were the best. The dulce were good, but the dulce got a little too brown while they were in the oven.

The little vanilla custard tarts were just cute. Ayesha cut out the pie crust for the tarts and baked them in the mini muffin pan. We let them cool and filled them with the cream and topped with a slice of strawberry.

Ayesha made her phenomenal scones again (how does she do it? she just throws stuff in a bowl and scones emerge from the oven. BOOM. BOOM. FIYAPOWAAAA) (You have to be super cool to know where that comes from). I made lemon curd and Ayesha made clotted cream.

Ayesha also made really yummy chocolate truffles. We though they would be too soft, but after a trip to the fridge, they were fine.

Awesome, right? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Of course, we only remembered to make the “tea” part of the high tea when we sat down to eat. We ate with Uncle Wahaj and Auntie Sarwat (Ayesha’s parents) and my parents. My dad summed it up nicely – “See, this is why we had daughters. If we had sons and we asked for some tea, they’d say….okay let’s go to Starbucks.”

yay!

(I’m sorry that this post is so late, but my blog was going through a series of technical difficulties, and I was going through a bout of laziness. But Ameir fixed my blog, and I finally got off my butt. As Sophie reminded me, I have an obligation to my readers who need my blog to procrastinate from their daily duties. Apologizes for the spazzing of both myself and my blog.)

I love roasted corn. The savory sweetness of each kernel, the way the grill-marked pieces pop softly in your mouth, the charred aroma. Yum. The best way to eat it is straight from the grill, rubbed with lime or lemon and coated in salt, black pepper, and paprika. You can also shave off the kernels and make a roasted corn salad.

Unfortunately, the latter is kind of impractical to make for a big crowd. Not everyone wants to gnaw corn off the cob and get those little pieces stuck in their teeth. Then again, corn is an essential part of a summer barbeque, and I was unwilling to give up the flavor experience that is grilled corn.

Also, I had better things to do than shave off corn kernels from a million cobs. Like decorate mini cupcakes with my sweet little sisters-in-law.

See – isn’t this much better than shucking corn? I divided up in an exact number how many each pair of hands was allowed to frost with the piping bag and decorate with the rainbow candy sprinkles. We have to make it even to prevent the “Why did she get more than me” discussion.

So I had to recreate the flavor of roasted corn the cheating way, grilling a five pound can of the sweet stuff.

At the end of the year International Law Journal banquet, the Editorial Staff treated us all to a dinner at Southern Rail Restaurant in Carboro. It was, to say the least, pretty phenomenal. There was a simple salad with a roasted garlic vinaigrette. Dessert was a coffee pot-au-creme with vanilla bean and nutmeg whipped cream. But dinner…oh…dinner was amazing. It was a linguini in a spicy tomato cream sauce with artichoke hearts and tomatoes, topped with a perfectly cooked salmon that had some kind of sweet crust to it. I don’t now how they did it, but it was just perfect.

To mirror that, I revamped my usual shrimp, spinach, tomato sauce pasta to try to capture the spicy-sweet aspect of Southern Rail’s salmon pasta. I didn’t know how to sweeten the shrimp, so I just caramelized the onions and garlic. Delicious!

Recipe after the link (more…)

Koshari is Egyptian street food – and, really, isn’t street food always the best part of any cuisine? It’s based on kitchery – a very simple rice and lentil mixture served in Pakistan and India. When Desi workers came to Egypt, they brought kitchery with them, and I really have to say that the Egyptians perfected it.

It’s really very simple. Lentils are cooked in a savory tomato sauce, and then the dish is served in layers: rice, tomato-y lentils, then caramelized or fried onions on top. It’s eaten spicy, so hot sauce is served alongside. Fancier versions have chickpeas and other legumes too. I added extra veggies by putting eggplant in the rice.

I made this over at Amy Aziza’s house at a mini housewarming party to break in her new kitchen. Angela made empanadas, because she’s Puerto Rican and awesome like that. Natasha brought Charlie Chaplain. Emilie was beautiful and smiling. It was great!

Koshari

2 cups lentils (I like brown lentils Koshari, the same as for this Eggplant and Lentil Stew)
1 large can tomato sauce (28 oz I think?)
2 cups rice + 4 cups broth or water to cook it in
1 eggplant
A lot of garlic (a lot)
A lot of onions (a lot)
Salt, pepper, hot sauce
Paprika or cayenne, depending on your heat tolerance
Cinnamon
Olive oil
Hot sauce to serve

1. (before you do anything else, start this, because onion caramelization is best if it is done over a long period of time. If you forget, cheat and add sugar). Dice or slice a lot of onions and put it on a medium low heat with a bit of olive oil. Let it go. Keep coming back and stirring it. Add some sugar if you want to help the onions along. At the end, before you serve, turn up the heat so the onions get crispy on the edges.

2. Chop one or two onions and a bunch of garlic and saute in some olive oil until soft-ish. Add the lentils and an equal part of water and boil until the lentils are almost soft. Drain any excess water, and then add more garlic and the tomato sauce. Simmer until lentils are soft. Salt and pepper it.

2. Cut the eggplant into chunks and put it in a colander. Salt it and let it drain for 15 min at least (this gets the bitterness out). Pat dry, sprinkle with cayenne, black pepper, and cinnamon, and fry in batches.

3. Sautee an onion and garlic until soft. Add the eggplant, stir. Add the rice and stir. Add some cinnamon (this is a Magrebi – Moroccan – touch that I really like, but the cinnamon is entirely optional) and black pepper. Add the liquid (water or broth) and cook the rice normally.

To serve: Put down a layer of rice, then a layer of tomato lentils, then top with caramelized onions. Add hot sauce to taste!

This flatbread have become kind of a staple snack or party food for me. I was inspired by a cheese-and-olive pie that Neomonde bakery makes (and theirs is much better than mine will ever be).

The green olives really make the dish – they’re just salty enough. Black olives may be a little too bitter for a delicate flatbread like this. I usually use Roma tomatoes, but today I had one of the big fat ones – just take care to cut it thinly so you don’t have juice making it soggy. If you slice the onions very thinly, they caramelize a bit, which makes a nice sweet contrast to the salty olives.

Tomato Olive Flatbread

1 Pillsbury Thin Crust pizza dough
1 Tomato, sliced thinly
handful of green olives, pitted and chopped
1 small onion, sliced very thinly
Shredded mixed Italian cheese
Handful of parsley, chopped
Garlic powder

1. Spread the pizza crust on a baking sheet. Cut in half lengthwise and stretch a little. You don’t need to roll it out, just stretch it a tad bit evenly around the sides.

2. Sprinkle with garlic powder and bake in a 400F oven for about 5 minutes (following the directions on the package for a crisper crust).

3. After it is lightly cooked, spread on the cheese, then the onion slices, tomato, green olives. Sprinkle parsley on the top.

4. Bake for 10-12 minutes until the crust is crispy and until cheese is melted (or browned, if you want).

Mustard Mayo potato salad – it’s…well….it’s kind of ickish. It’s only something you can have a little bit of at a time, or go through phases of it (you eat a big tub, then you’re off it for a year). Also, it kind of only edible at picnics, isn’t it?

I saw something like this on Barefoot Contessa. After boiling the potatoes, she puts in chicken broth and white wine. Well, I didn’t have any of the former, and I’ll never have any of the latter (the Muslim thing, and all). And I didn’t have mustard to make a vinaigrette, but the garlic and rosemary flavored olive oil in this was just perfect. This is a really light, fresh potato salad that I served with chicken sandwiches. Hot, warm, or room temp, I think, would be best.

Warm Garlic and Rosemary Potato Salad

10 small new red potatoes
1 – 2 tbs fresh rosemary sprigs
2 big cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 to 1/2 cup olive oil
4 scallions, chopped
Handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped
Salt and black pepper

1. Pour olive oil into a pan over low or medium low flame. Add the garlic and just let it simmer lightly until it gets golden brown. This will take only about three minutes – think of it as steeping. At the very last second, put in the fresh rosemary sprigs and let them sizzle for a few seconds.

2. Clean and quarter the potatoes, then put them into cold water. Add salt. Boil the water and potatoes until potatoes are soft. Drain.

3. Pour the hot olive oil onto the hot potatoes. Mix well.

4. Mix in the fresh chopped parsley and scallions. Salt, pepper, and eat!

This really simple spice rub livens up sweet potatoes for a great side dish. If you want them saucy, you could cook them a little in a fresh tomato sauce after they come out of the oven.

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Amy made this incredible Korean Salad to go with the butternut squash and wild mushroom pierogies. It sounded weird at first because of the different tastes, but the spicy-tart vinaigrette really goes well with anything creamy.

The original recipe says to make it with only lettuce and chives, but Amy adds cucumbers as well, which I think is a great idea. Finely grated carrot or radish would be great in this too.

Korean Salad

2 tsp toasted sesame oil
1/2 tsp crushed red chili flakes, or to taste
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp rice vinegar or other mild vinegar (if you use apple, you probably don’t need the sugar)
1/2 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp sugar
Chives, a couple of large bunches
4 cups any tender lettuce or mixed lettuces
1 cucumber, seeds removed and diced
1 tbs toasted sesame seeds for garnish, optional.

1. Make dressing by combining sesame oil with chili flakes, soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, sugar and about a tablespoon of water.
2. Wash and dry chives, then cut them into 1- or 2-inch lengths. Wash and dry lettuce. Toss chives and cucumber with lettuce, then pour dressing over all and toss again. Garnish with sesame seeds, if using, and serve immediately.