Recipes, aka 'mix, taste, add more, taste, mix, serve with a garnish.'

Tuesday I decided I needed to do some research before I could go out on my own again. I spent the day at home sitting in the kitchen with my aunt as she prepared food for dinner (but refused to let me help): swiss chard soup with small lentils, baba ghanoush, chard stalk in tahini sauce and an undetermined part of chicken that I fear is not the usual muscle.

Tahini sauce is easy enough to make, it consists only of tahini (100% sesame seeds), copious amounts of lemon juice and water, olive oil and garlic mashed into a paste. I would give you measurements for a recipe, but she doesn't calculate. The same is true for the baba ghanoush. First you roast the eggplant (Tiigy did this over the open flame on the gas stove, I have done it in the oven), then remove the insides, slice it into smaller pieces and mash it up into a lumpy consistency. Add some tahini sauce, lemon juice and salt. Mix together, taste, add more. Taste, blend, keeping it lumpy. Add a little olive oil, then serve with a sprig of nana (mint).

And while we're talking about recipes, here is one for kibbe that she gave me last week while cooking. I don't fully understand her directions so maybe someone (Mom? Auntie Marilyn?) can fill in the blanks.

1 kilo of lamb, no fat, from the butcher, finely blended in a cuisinart
3 1/2 (cups? I forgot to write this down) burghul, small
wash burghul once the meat is ready and let it sit for one hour
pound the meat
blend in mixer: 2 onions, red/green peppers, salt, black pepper (unless you're Lauren, then you can omit the black pepper)

Mix to taste, add mint.
When it is very soft, mix with bughul and meat. Knead for a long time, wetting hands, and leave overnight in the fridge.

For the filling:

2 kilo lamb, ground.
4 onions (the size of your fist): cut finely
sautee in olive oil, add snowbud before it is finished cooking. then add meat. cook.
peppers, red/green
black pepper
salt.

This kibbe she prepared as little saucers, flattening out circles the size of her palm, putting filling in the middle with a little clarified butter, adding another flattened circle on top and pinching together the edges. bake in oven.

Hopefully I can get some more recipes from her before I leave.


Oh right, the rest of the day, I called various tourist agencies to see what day trips they had planned for the rest of the week. Only two had a schedule up (again, its the off-season) for trips around $60-70 each, and one promised to call me back.

For lunch and dinner we had the food my aunt had prepared that day, though I started to have stomach problems while tasting the food in the morning and didn't eat very much.