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You are here: Home / Archives for Cuisine / Middle Eastern

Three Middle Eastern Dips

January 29, 2025 by admin Leave a Comment

I love learning about Middle Eastern cooking. I love the flavours, colours, mixture of savoury and sweet, and I also particularly like serving a table full of different plates of food where everyone can help themselves. As well as making flatbread, I like making simple, tasty, colourful dips. Here are two regulars on our table plus one that I invented yesterday.

Carrot and Caraway Dip

Nothing could be simpler than this tasty dip! This recipe comes from The Complete Book of Turkish Cooking by Ghillie Basan. This book is out of print, but Basan is a prolific author, so please hunt down her books. Here’s my take on it.

3 large carrots – peeled and thickly sliced

Steam or boil the carrots until tender. Drain and mash them coarsely.

Stir in 1/2 tsp caraway seeds, 1 tbsp olive oil, juice of 1/4 lemon, 1/4 tsp salt and some cracked black pepper.

That’s it! You can also leave out the lemon juice and instead serve it with yoghurt with some lemon juice and garlic mixed through. Basan garnishes with mint leaves but I’m not a fan of mint.

Beetroot Moutabel with Tahini

Here’s another brilliant and relatively simple dip. It requires a little more time but not much effort. The recipe is from the amazing Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume by Silvena Rowe –  a book that has one of the best cookbook covers ever.

2 medium beetroot
1/2 lemon
1-2 tbsp greek yoghurt
1 tbsp tahini
salt
Peel from one orange (optional)
Toasted walnuts (optional)

Bake the beetroot in the oven for about an hour at 180 C. I usually scrub them and bake them in their skins wrapped in foil. Then peel them with a teaspoon while warm (yes, wear gloves).

Put 1.5 of the beetroot, chopped into a food processor and keep the other half. Blitz with juice of 1/4 lemon, yoghurt, tahini and a pinch of salt. Grate the remaining beetroot and stir it through the mix (this adds texture to the dip).

With the recipe you can add more (or less) yoghurt, tahini and lemon juice to suit your taste.

If using orange peel, toast for one minute in a frypan, cool and place on top of the dip. If using walnuts, chop them and toast them in a pan and sprinkle on top of the dip.

The colour of this dip is amazing.

Charred Cauliflower and Onion Dip

Here’s the recipe that I made up last night.

1/4 large caulflower
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 medium onion
3 tbsp greek yoghurt
Juice of 1/4 lemon
1/2 tsp aleppo pepper flakes (or red pepper flakes) or 1/4 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp chopped garlic
Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Cut the cauliflower into medium-sized florets and mix with olive oil and 1 tsp salt. Bake at 200C for 20-25 min until it is starting to char on the outside (black not brown).

Cut the onion into about 3 thick slices. Cook in a frypan in olive oil on medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes until it starts to brown/char a bit on the outside. Chop the onion roughly.

Blitz the cauliflower and onion roughly in a food processor with the garlic and some cracked pepper. You want the mixture to be chunky, not smooth.

Add juice of 1/4 lemon, 1/2 tsp aleppo pepper flakes (or 1/4 tsp chilli flakes) and 3 tbsp yoghurt and mix with a spoon (you can mix it in the food processor but don’t overmix it.)

Once again, this is really simple and very tasty.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Dairy, Middle Eastern, Vegetarian Tagged With: dips, middle eastern, yoghurt

Seven Spice Chicken with Flatbread

July 8, 2021 by admin Leave a Comment

Here’s my middle eastern chicken with flatbread. I’m on the hunt for good but simple flatbread recipes, and this recipe from Gourmet Traveller did the trick. I did however add twice as much water, and then had to add more flour and yoghurt to compensate! Nevertheless, I’m standing by the recipe!

The chicken recipe came from The Lebanese Kitchen by Salma Hage and is for Chicken Sharwama.

Cut chicken breast into strips and soak overnight in a mixture of 3 tbsp malt vinegar, juice of 1/2 lemon (maybe 2 tsp?) and 3 tbsp water.

The next day toss it in Lebanese seven spice seasoning, add some salt and pepper. You can buy the seasoning or make it yourself. Hage’s spice mix is as follows:

5 tbsp ground allspice
3 1/2 tbsp pepper
3 1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
5 tbsp ground cloves
4tbsp ground nutmeg
4 tbsp ground fenugreek (coriander is an alternative)
4 tbsp ground ginger

The recipe says to bake the chicken strips at 200C for 30 minutes. I thought that this would dry them out and it did – I pulled them out of the oven early. Next time I’d just sear them in a pan.

The chicken is served on some baked veg with home-made baba ganoush and saffron-cumin rice cooked in chicken stock.

Pine nuts, pomegranate seeds, some chard from our garden, a slice of lemon and yoghurt. A great combination.

Filed Under: Bread, Middle Eastern, Poultry

Feta and Lamb Gozleme

July 18, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Tonight I made gozleme for the first time, and it turned out really well. I hunted my cookbooks and online for recipes, and they were all varied. Some had yeast and some didn’t. Some were flour and oil. Some included yoghurt. In the end I based it on this recipe from Gourmet Traveller.

I made half the dough recipe for the two of us.

100g wholemeal flour
200g plain flour
130ml water
75ml plain yoghurt
1 tbsp vegetable oil

I mixed these in the bread machine for 10 minutes.

Read the recipe to see how to roll it out. I think I added too much oil in the rolling process, as it was a little greasy.

Once rolled and folded, the dough rested for about half an hour and that was fine, as it absorbed the oil more and softened.

For the filling I combined
shredded silverbeet leaves (raw)
spring onions
finely chopped roast lamb
minced garlic
home-made feta
mozarella
2 tsp Turkish spice mix from Herbie’s Spices
juice of 1/4 lemon
black pepper and sea salt

Assemble and cook as in the recipe.

It’s a bit of work to roll out the dough. I was really happy with the finished thickness and texture.

Filed Under: Bread, Lamb, Middle Eastern

Dukkah-crusted Garfish

July 13, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

I’ve been remiss in not posting lately. Here’s a recent plate of dukkah-crusted garfish with carrot puree, baksed cauliflower, charred capsicum, parsley and yoghurt.

I’ve previously made this with garfish fillets, but this time cooked whole garfish.

The dukkah crumb recipe comes from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s fabulous book “Malouf“.

50 hazelnuts
8 tbsp sesame seeds
4 tbsp coriander seeds
3 tbsp cumin seeds

Toast each of these separately in a dry pan, then crush together.

Dip the fish in plain flour, then egg and then the dukkah. Deep fry for 4 minutes.

Filed Under: Middle Eastern, Seafood

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THE COOK

I live and cook in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. The region is similar to the Mediterranean, with temperate climate, fertile hills, nearby ocean, wonderful local vegetables, fruit, wine and meat produced locally. Cooking has been a growing passion for me, about connecting culture, creativity, community and spirit. The small garden in our new home is currently being established with some native bush ‘tucker plants’ and a range of herbs. I’ve just bought a yuzu tree!

Photos taken on iPhone 4, 5 and X and a Canon 5D Mk III.

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