I’m Back, with Bread

I have been living outside of the US for more than four years now; during this time, I have visited home on four occasions. Like other gradual transformations (wrinkles on the forehead, extra pounds around the hips), perhaps changes in one’s country are best noticed after prolonged absences. Maybe if I had lived in the U.S. last year, for example, I would have barely noticed the creep, creep, creep with which flavored water asserted itself on the shelves of my grocery store and the menus of my favorite sandwich shops. Perhaps I would have quietly absorbed the fact that water could somehow become healthier than itself through infusions of pomegranate and injections of vitamins.

Instead, I stepped off the plane excited to simply drink water straight from the tap without the tedium of boiling and filtering. Which meant I was dumbstruck by the innocently-posed question: “So, what flavor water would you like?” Um, the watery water flavor?

My first visit home three years ago was marked by a similarly perplexing experience.

I joined the lunchtime line at Bruegger's, very excited about eating my first bagel in more than a year. (However inauthentic you may think Bruegger's bagels are, they are the epitome of bagel-dom after viewing what passes for a bagel in Australia.) There I was, grappling with the deep “Everything? Or whole grain?” question, when I overheard a snippet of conservation. The store manager was commenting to his assistant, “I get asked to make those all the time now.” I followed his gaze until I spotted a bagel, plain, being totally eviscerated. As I stared, the assistant used his plastic-gloved finger to tear the entire inside bread from the bagel crust. He proceeded to layer sandwich fillings onto a bread-less bagel half.

What? A bread-less bagel? What is going on?

And then it hit me, the phenomenon I had missed while I was away: Atkins.

So, today, in honor of “catch-me-dumbstruck” food moments past, present and future, I offer you an extremely bready, completely anti-Atkins, Moroccan bread. Which I recommend you serve with tap water.

Moroccan Flatbread with Yeast (Batbout M’Khamer)
Slightly adapted From World Vegetarian
Makes 5

1 teaspoon / 5 milliliters active dry yeast
½ teaspoon / 2.5 milliliters sugar
1¾ cups / 210 grams unbleached, all-purpose white flour
1½ cups / 300 grams fine semolina flour
1½ teaspoons / 7.5 milliliters salt
Olive oil

Combine the yeast, sugar and 2 tablespoons of warm water in a small bowl. Stir to dissolve completely. Set aside for 5 minutes, or until the yeast begins to bubble.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mound the white flour and the semolina flour into the shape of a small hill. Hollow a crater on the hilltop and put the salt and the yeast mixture into it. Now slowly pour warm water into the crater. You will need about 1 cup of warm water, or slightly more. As you add the water, slowly gather the flour together into a ball. Keep adding the water a little at a time while gathering the dough, until the dough begins to form a soft, smooth ball. Once you can form a ball, begin to knead. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes, or until it is smooth and elastic. Form a ball.

Lightly grease a large, flat platter with the olive oil and set it aside. Coat your hands slightly with the oil. Break the dough into 5 equal, smooth balls. Place the balls on the oiled plate a good distance from one another. Cover with a clean dishcloth and set in a warm place for 5 to 10 minutes.

Lightly grease your countertop. Take one ball and, with the flat part of your fingers, flatten it out until it is 1/4-inch / 6-millimeters thick and 6 inches / 15.5 centimeters in diameter. (Note: Mine ended up slightly larger at this thickness.) Follow the same procedure with all of the balls. Cover the flatbreads with a clean dishcloth and set them aside for 1 hour.

Set a large, cast-iron frying pan over medium heat and let it get very hot. Pick up one flatbread and lay it in the center of the frying pan. Cook for 1 minute. Turn the bread over and cook for another minute. Now turn the bread over four more times, cooking each side for just 30 seconds. The bread should have some toasty brown spots on each side. Then stand the bread in the pan as if it were a wheel, and, using an oven mitt, hold one side of the bread with your thumb, and the other side with your middle finger. Slowly rotate the bread, just like a wheel, and lightly cook the edges for 1 minute. Place the flatbread on a dishcloth, and wrap it up. Make all the breads this way, stacking them on top of each other, and covering them each time. The bread will stay warm for about 30 minutes.

This recipe comes from Madhur Jaffrey, and she describes the bread as pita-like. Indeed, Mark and I tore them into two skinny flat pieces and used them to scoop up curry. You could also make a pocket and stuff it with your favorite sandwich filling. If you have leftovers, store them in tinfoil and simply pop them in the toaster oven the next day.

Tags: recipe, bread, Morocco, North Africa, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

After a Pause, A Pudding

Greetings from cold, rainy Boston, Massachusetts. Yep, that’s right, I am away from Zimbabwe for the moment and am visiting family and friends in the U.S. I thought I would have lots of free time during my trip, free time during which I would cook many delectable African dishes that would win the admiration of many wary-eyed family members, and that I would transform into many wonderful blog posts. The reality: few items have been cooked and, until now, no posts have been written. Instead, I have been wooed by shopping malls and feted by friends, spent hours of drop-jaw gawking at the amazing offerings of Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Wilson Farms, and been re-introduced to the joys of surfing with a fast (as opposed to a 32kbs) internet connection. Ah, the many wonders of the (over)developed world.

I have squeezed in a bit of cooking – not the elaborate feasts I had a mind, but a few dishes here and there, including these beans, this stew and beetroot pesto pasta. The biggest admirer of every dish has been my 16-month old nephew, who, I’ve learned, will eat and drink absolutely anything. I have seen him gobble up pickles and clams, bite into a fresh lemon, and take a sip of black coffee – and go back each time for another gobble, bite and sip. He may not be discerning, but he is certainly the most adventurous little eater I have ever seen. (Here seen eating the aforementioned pasta).

Thus, it was not surprising that Little Matthew used two hands as he devoured the apricot pudding I made using a recipe from Colette Rossant’s Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes. This dish had other family fans, too, including my mom, who was seen eating a bowl for breakfast and claimed the pudding’s intense apricot flavor become better every day. This dish is a great springtime dessert because of its sunny yellow color – I wish I had made it for Easter, in fact. The most fun part of this recipe is seeing how the dried apricots, after being soaked overnight, actually plump up until they are almost the size of fresh apricots. I was amazed!

Without further ado, here is apricot pudding, a recipe I hope will tide you over until I return to Zimbabwe in mid-May…or until I somehow sneak away from the many distractions vying for my attention to cook and write another post!

Apricot Pudding
Slightly adapted from Apricots on the Nile
Serves 6 or more

450 grams / 2 cups dried apricots
6 large eggs
90 milliliters / ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy cream
30 milliliters / 2 tablespoons rum
150 grams / ¾ cup sugar

Place the pound dried apricots in a bowl, cover them with warm water, and soak overnight. Drain.

Pre-heat the oven to 180° C / 350° F. Place the apricots, eggs, heavy cream, rum and sugar in a food processor. Process until the apricots are puréed. Butter a 1½ liter / 1½ -quart mold, and pour the apricot purée into the mold. Place the mold in a larger pan filled with hot water. Bake for 50-60 minutes, or until the point of a knife inserted in the middle of the pudding comes out clean. Cool.

I’m sure this is pudding heresy, but I didn’t unmold the pudding after it cooled; instead, I served scoops straight from the mold. Unmold if you wish! Rossant suggests garnishing with mint leaves.

Tags: dessert, apricot, pudding, recipe, Egypt, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Home-Baked Beans

About seven years ago, I worked at a global education museum, where I helped develop exhibits that introduced U.S. schoolchildren to the world outside their country’s borders. One of the exhibits encouraged kids to think about how people around the world are connected by international trade. In an effort to make these connections, sometimes I’d talk with groups of children about where their favorite foods came from. Here is the start of a typical discussion:

Me: Today, let’s talk about some of your very favorite foods and think about where they come from. Who wants to tell us their favorite food? Let’s hear from you [pointing to the 8-year-old in the blue sweatshirt jumping up and down with his hand raised].

Boy: Hot dogs!

Me [thinking, oh dear, I really don’t want to get in a discussion about where hot dogs come from]: Great, that’s a great favorite food. Let’s hear from someone else, too. How about you [pointing to the girl in the purple shirt]?

Girl: Macaroni and cheese!

Me: What kind of macaroni and cheese, the kind you make at home, or the kind you buy in a box?

Girl [screwing up her face as if confused]: Well, we make it at home but it comes from a box!

Me: Oh, right, of course. Now, where does that macaroni and cheese come from?

All the kids in unison: THE SUPERMARKET!

Me: But, how did the box get to the supermarket?

Children [blank stares, silence].

Me: And how did the noodles and cheese get into the box?

Children [blank stares, silence].

Me: And where did the noodles and cheese come from?

Children [blank stares, silence].

Me: Do you think that boxes of macaroni and cheese grow on supermarket shelves?

Children [laughter, followed by blank stares].

Me: Okay, let’s try to work backwards and figure out how this box got to your supermarket….

This story brings me, somehow, to baked beans. Because, not too long ago, if you had asked me how a can of baked beans got to my house, I would probably stutter and stumble and say something like: well, obviously, the beans need to be baked, probably in big batches in a very big oven. Hmm, I’m not sure what type of beans they are, though – maybe a special baking bean? And then there is the sweet and salty sauce that goes on them, or maybe that is what they are baked in – I’m not sure. And then the whole mixture gets poured into a can and goes by truck to the supermarket where I buy it!

Being from Boston, the home of Boston baked beans, I feel I should definitely know more about baked beans and where they come from. Lucky for me, food writers and bloggers have been quite interested in baked beans lately.

While seeking out an African version of baked beans, I found Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Baked Beans with Nigerian Seasonings. These beans are warmth itself, satisfying and hearty with a hint of spice. They work well as a light dinner or side dish – just remember that the recipe takes two hours to bake, so its not something you want to start preparing at 7:30 on a weeknight! If you have leftovers, try a breakfast of whole-wheat toast topped with the beans.

The main seasoning in these beans is curry powder, which I more closely associate with the East African coastal cooking of Kenya and Tanzania and the Cape Malay cuisine of South Africa rather than with Nigerian cooking. But Jaffrey is one of my favorite chefs, so who I am to question her? After all, the recipe does ask for a hefty amount of black pepper – a very Nigerian touch. The other interesting ingredient in these baked beans is peanut butter, an item used in many dishes in sub-Saharan Africa (including this stew and this snack). In fact, to my mind, these beans are better named “Africa-inspired baked beans.”

I’ve prepared Jaffrey’s baked beans several times now, and I like to make them even more Africa-inspired (and a bit more colorful) by adding a locally-grown green leafy vegetable (such as rape, covo or pumpkin leaves). I’ve added greens both before and after the baking stage. I think “after” works better, although this is not how I did things on the day my husband took the photo above. The recipe works best with delicate cannellini beans, but any small-to-medium white bean will do. When I can’t find white beans at the store, I use local sugar beans instead. Finally, note that you can modify the proportion of hot versus mild curry powder depending on your heat preferences. Enjoy!

Baked Beans with Nigerian Seasonings
Slightly adapted from World Vegetarian
Serves 4-6

180 grams / 1 cup dried cannellini beans
62 milliliters / ¼ cup peanut or canola oil
1 medium onion, peeled, halved and thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
5 milliliters / 1 teaspoon hot curry powder
10 milliliters / 2 teaspoons mild curry powder
2 large tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped
22.5 milliliters / 1½ tablespoons smooth peanut butter
6.2 milliliters / 1¼ teaspoons salt
Very generous grind of black pepper
45 grams / 1½ cups of your favorite green leafy vegetable, finely chopped

Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water. Drain.

Put the beans in a pot with 875 milliliters / 3½ cups of water and bring to a boil, skimming off the foam that rises to the top. Cover partially, turn the heat down to medium-low, and simmer gently for 40-60 minutes until the beans are just tender.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large fry pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook for 1-2 minutes until the onion has just wilted, stirring almost constantly to ensure it doesn’t burn. Add the garlic, stir, and cook for another 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the curry powders and stir, then add the tomatoes and stir again. Cook for 7-10 minutes, until the tomatoes have softened. Transfer this mixture into a medium casserole dish.

Pre-heat the oven to 162°C / 325°F while you wait for the beans to finish cooking.

Spoon the peanut butter into a small bowl. When the beans are ready, remove 6 tablespoons of the cooking water from the pot and slowly add it to the peanut butter, stirring as you go. Pour the beans and their remaining liquid into the casserole dish. Stir in the peanut butter mixture, salt and pepper.

Bake, uncovered, for two hours until much of the liquid has evaporated and the beans are very tender. Add the greens just after you remove the dish from the oven, and stir them around until they wilt. Serve hot.

Tags: recipe, beans, baked beans, Nigeria, West Africa, peanut butter, main dish, side dish, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Faves on Friday #3: Orange Polenta Cake

I never speak about my job on this blog, and don’t really plan to (especially not on Fridays!), but forgive a brief reference. One thing I do is help identify, document and share “lessons learned” from my organization’s work, so that we can keep using approaches that are successful and remember not to repeat past mistakes. I thought of this aspect of my job earlier this week, while considering the fact that it has been a couple of months since my last Fave on Friday.

“Why such a lapse?” I asked myself. And therein lay a lesson learned: I should not tie myself down to doing anything in particular on Fridays. What was I thinking? On Fridays, I am a get home from work and have a glass of wine kind of person, or a de-stress by playing a set of tennis kind of person (and, I must admit, sometimes I am BOTH kinds of people). On Fridays, I am not, however, a cook something tasty and write about it kind of person.

Which is why I decided that I need to become a prepare something tasty on Wednesday, write about it on Thursday and simply press “publish” on Friday kind of person.

This orange polenta cake is moist, moist, moist – almost to the point of disintegrating before your very eyes. The orange and lemon make it light and bright, and the polenta adds a distinct heartiness to the texture. It is a welcome dessert after a heavy meal, or a fantastic accompaniment to your afternoon tea. And, as befits a Fave on Friday (even one prepared on Wednesday!), I’ve baked this cake again and again and again….

Now, those of you in Zimbabwe will read this recipe and say: where do you buy polenta? You don’t use mealie meal as substitute do you? Ground almonds – wherever do you find ground almonds? And sour cream? You find sour cream in the shops? Are you sure you live in Harare?

Full disclosure: I brought back quite a bit of polenta from my trip to Rome – mealie meal is just too fine to use as a substitute. For ground almonds, check Green Park and hope you catch them just before they raise prices – otherwise their ground almonds can be quite pricy. Sour cream is nowhere to be found. I substitute crème fraîche.

Orange Polenta Cake with Whole Orange Syrup
From Food and Home Entertaining, July 2005
Serves 8

Cake
125 grams / 1 stick plus 1 scant tablespoon butter, softened
225 grams / 1¼ cup castor (granulated) sugar
3 large eggs
75 grams / ½ cup plus scant tablespoon self-raising flour
75 grams / ½ cup plus scant tablespoon cake flour
125 grams / generous ¾ cup fine polenta
60 grams / generous ½ cup ground almonds
80 grams / 1/3 cup sour cream
Rind of 1 lemon, grated
Rind of 1 orange, grated
60 milliliters / 4 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

Whole orange syrup
2 whole oranges with skin, thinly sliced
180 grams / ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons castor sugar
300 milliliters / 1 1/5 cups water

Crème fraîche, to serve

Grease and line a 20-centimeter / 8-inch cake tin and preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

In a medium bowl, whisk the butter and castor sugar together until pale. Continue whisking as you add the eggs one at a time. If your mixture looks a bit curdled, don’t worry – everything will come together once you add the dry ingredients.

In a separate bowl, sift the flours together. Then, add the flours to the egg mixture and stir to combine. Stir in the polenta, ground almonds, sour cream, zest and lemon juice. Transfer the mixture to the prepared tin. Bake for 75 minutes, covering the cake with tin foil during the last 15 minutes if it is getting too brown.

Meanwhile, place the oranges, castor sugar and water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the mixture is thick and syrupy – about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

Once the cake is baked, let it rest for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a plate. Cool for another 15 minutes. Then, use a wooden skewer or piece of dry spaghetti to make holes in the top of the cake. Pour the orange syrup over the cake. Decorate the cake with the orange slices, and serve slices with a dollap of crème fraîche.

Read my past Faves on Fridays:
#1: Curried Tomato Soup
#2: Spaghetti with Beetroot Pesto

Tags: recipe, dessert, Faves on Fridays, polenta, cake, orange, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Cooking Stew, Reminiscing Too

You cannot read Colette Rossant’s Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes without envying the stunning array of Egyptian and French food – from simple street food to elaborate wedding-day specialties – that she enjoyed as a child. Nor can you help admiring Rossant’s vivid memories of how these favorite dishes wove themselves in and out of her daily life. You also can’t avoid pondering what recipes might form the culinary unpinning of your own memoir.

Today, as I prepared Soeur Leila’s Red Lentil Stew – one of the book’s 43 recipes – I reflected on just this question: what recipes might help me tell the story of my childhood? Surely, this was too big a question to fully answer on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Even so, a rush of scents and flavors and recollections flooded into my head. In fact, I’m lucky Rossant’s lentil stew recipe is so effortless – anything more complicated would have been too much for my distracted brain to handle.

So what recipes did I think of? To describe an everyday weeknight in my home, the memoir would have to include pepperoni pie – a dense quiche studded with spicy nibs of pepperoni. I don’t eat meat anymore, but if you put a slice of this beloved childhood dish in front of me, I’d find it hard to resist. Another weeknight favorite was a salad made solely from lightly-dressed chicory – a frilly, bitter-tasting green that, I suspect, no other sibling team in history has loved as much. Armed with think slabs of Italian bread, my brother and I would dive right in, elbowing each other over who got to soak up the leftover vinaigrette at the bottom of the bowl. (My dad calls soaking up sauce or dressing with bread “mojuring” – I have no idea if this is an English word, and Italian word, or a made-up word. But that is the word we use.). And, of course, I’d feature my grandmother’s molasses cookies, mature versions of the brown sugar spoonfuls she gave me when I had the hiccups, and tell the story of how, later in her life, her cookies tasted different every time depending on which ingredient she had forgotten to add.

Growing up, I remember contributing to the preparation of many dishes, although my parents might have different perspective on whether I was helping or hindering their efforts. On long weekends, my dad would labor over Italian specialties passed down through his ancestors’ kitchens. Lasagna made with a layer of sliced braciole was a favorite, and it was my job to help him tie strings around the rolls of breaded meat. When my mom prepared her meatloaf, she would beckon me from my homework spot at the dining room table so that I could squish the ingredients together with my hands. I also liked to make an appearance during the most exciting part of chicken cutlet preparation – the assembly line production of dipping each piece of meat in egg, then breadcrumbs.

Other food memories are inexorably linked to holidays. When I was in school, the weeks approaching Christmastime were a time for accumulating huge quantities of candy canes from friends and teachers. Taking advantage of this bounty, my family and I would crush the canes and make peppermint stick ice cream. And, to this day, Christmas parties feature my mom’s minestrone soup, a dish that, amazingly, she has never tasted because she doesn’t like beans, but which has gained acclaim from even the most vociferous vegetable-haters. If my mom doesn’t make minestrone soup at Christmastime, she risks an insurrection.

Another soup recipe would also have to make the memoir – pasta fagiole. I love this soup so much that, during my sophomore year in college, my parents made the valiant (and slightly nutty) attempt to send me a few servings in a care package. At my university (and, I would assume, all universities), whenever care packages arrived, you would accumulate an ever-growing troop of observers (a.k.a. aspiring package-sharers) as you carried your box from the post office, into your dorm, and up to your room. How disappointed my bystanders were to discover that my package contained no candy, no cookies – only spoiled soup that had leaked out of its Tupperware container.

Although my food memories are quite different from Rossant’s, they, too, are blessed with the warming combination of family, celebrations and the daily bread of everyday life. The red lentil stew recipe Rossant shares is a hearty, wholesome dish she was served on Fridays at her convent school. Like many a favorite childhood food, it is, she says, a recipe she continues to make today.

Soeur Leila’s Red Lentil Stew
Slightly adapted from Apricots on the Nile
Serves 4 as a main course

500 milliliters / 2 cups split red lentils, picked over and rinsed
1 liter/ 4 cups vegetable broth
2 large onions, chopped (divided)
1 large tomato, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
2 small zucchini, chopped
1 teaspoon ground cumin
150 grams / 1/3 pound angel hair or vermicelli pasta, broken into small pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
30 milliliters / 2 tablespoons olive oil
30 milliliters / 2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped

Place the lentils, broth, 1 onion, tomato, carrot and zucchini in a medium saucepan, and bring to a boil. Skim off any foam that bubbles up. Then lower the heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Purée the mixture using a hand blender. Stir in the ground cumin, pasta, salt and pepper. Simmer, uncovered for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Add additional vegetable broth if you would like a slightly thinner stew.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a small fry pan over medium heat. Add the remaining one onion and sauté for 8-10 minutes, or until golden. Add the onion and any remaining drops of oil to the lentils and simmer for five minutes. Serve in bowls with a sprinkling of parsley. Rossant recommends garnishing with croutons made from pita bread.

Tags: recipe, Egypt, lentils, lentil stew, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

The Dairy

“Right near your house there is a Greek woman who makes haloumi. Just round that corner and look for the black gate. Tell her I sent you.”

“The wife of my Japanese mechanic sells the tofu she makes at home – let me know if you want to buy a block.”

An endearing feature of life in Harare is the vast number of unmarked, unpublicized businesses that you hear about by word of mouth. Restaurants that only open for small groups on pre-arranged days; immigrants and expatriates that sell homemade, traditional foods, straight from their kitchens; talented artists who market sculptures from hidden backyard galleries framed by rows of maize.

One day, more than a year ago, two friends told me they knew a couple who drove twenty minutes outside of town to buy milk and cheese from a dairy farm, that the farm was impossible to find unless you followed someone, AND that it was only open for one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. The couple with the insider knowledge was making a trip later in the day.

Did we want to go? Of course we did.

And so Mark and I became acquainted with what we now simply call “The Dairy.” The Dairy is run by an unintentionally charismatic mother-and-son team (let’s call them Shirley and Frank), and the reason it is open for only two hours a day is that these are the hours when the cows are milked. The milk travels from udder to pail to your container. It is still warm. And rich. And creamy. Like a concentrated version of store-bought milk.

In addition to milk, The Dairy also sells goat and cow feta, a dense and creamy soft goat cheese, and a cottage cheese speckled with chives or fresh thyme. This cottage cheese is what I would call cream cheese, although Frank says I am wrong. Cottage versus cream is not the only linguistic debate I have with Frank, who also contests my pronunciation of gouda. I say goo-da, he says gow-da. “Is the goo-da ready yet?” I ask. “I don’t make goo-da, I make gow-da,” Frank replies.

Speaking of The Dairy’s gouda…oh, how wonderful it is. Shaped like an oversized hockey puck, wrapped in wax and, inside, smooth with just a tinge of sharpness that unravels as it hits your tongue. The gouda is rarely available and, when in stock, is stored out of sight. You need to know to ask for it. To secure a wheel, you also must demonstrate respect and love for cheese. Frank tells the story of a woman who wanted to buy two wheels of gouda, one to eat now and the other to freeze for future consumption. He refused to sell her any cheese because she had considered desecrating the cheese by freezing it.

Today the gouda was tantalizingly close to me – Frank retrieved two wheels from his hiding place just so we could take a photo. He said the cheese tastes good now, but is too mild – it would be ready for sale in two weeks. I had an idea – couldn’t I just buy a wheel today and keep it in my fridge for two weeks? No, Frank said, he knew how much I liked the cheese and didn’t trust me – I would surely eat it early. The Dairy drives a tough bargain.

A few months ago, we heard The Dairy might be taken over as a result of the government’s ongoing land reform program. I can’t say we were shocked, but we were immensely saddened – sad for the family, the farm workers, the animals, and, quite selfishly, ourselves. No more calming walk past the animal stalls with the farm dogs scrambling around our feet. No more debates over goo-da and gow-da. And the thought of having to buy the soggy, chewy, greasy supermarket products that pass as “cheese” was just unbearable. Luckily, The Dairy survived. We appreciate it even more.

This post is an entry in Food Destinations #5: Where Everybody Knows Your Name, hosted by From Our Kitchen. Food Destinations is a food blog event established by I Was Really Just Very Hungry.

Tags: Zimbabwe, food blog event, Food Destinations, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa

Rotating Veggies, Roasted

My favorite recipe-of-the-moment? “A Rotating Cast of Vegetables, Roasted, with Cheese from the Dairy.”

Let me explain. You already know I have a soft spot for recipes that are flexible – ones that welcome, without judgment, the variety and quantity of veggies that presently occupy my fridge. But I haven’t let you in yet on my nascent roasting kick. It started with roasting broccoli, and has expanded to roasting leeks, garlic, carrots, zucchini, tomatoes and green beans, with a preference for tossing a handful of fresh herbs atop the veggies during the last five minutes of their roast. I also haven’t acquainted you with my love of cheese – hard cheese, soft cheese, pungent cheese, mild cheese, sharp cheese, all cheese. My husband and I buy our cheese from a family-run dairy on the outskirts of town, a dairy so wonderful that it is worthy of its own separate post (coming soon!). I eat some of this dairy’s cheese – cow feta, goat feta, a creamy boursin, and, when available (oh-too-rarely), a velvety gouda – practically every day.

Lucky for me, many dishes qualify as “A Rotating Cast of Vegetables, Roasted, with Cheese from the Dairy,” including myriad soups, dips and casseroles. Today, my dish of choice was Moroccan Turlu Turlu with Feta. This dish is a cornucopia of vegetables tossed in a warmly-spiced tomato-y dressing, roasted, and anointed with crumbled feta. It is substantial enough to serve for dinner with some crusty bread. Have leftovers? They’ll make a savory filling for your omelet the next morning. It goes without saying that the vegetables in this recipe are quite flexible. Use the ones listed below – or select your own cast.

Moroccan Turlu Turlu with Feta
Adapted from Sprigs: Fresh Kitchen Inspiration
Serves 8 or more

12 small zucchini (a.k.a. courgettes), cut into 12 millimeter / ½-inch slices
2 medium eggplants (a.k.a. brinjals, aubergines), cut into 12 millimeter / ½-inch cubes
2 onions, cut into wedges
1 green pepper, thickly sliced
6 carrots, cut into 12 millimeter / ½-inch slices
300 grams / 2 2/3 cups green beans, cut into 2-inch pieces
1 400-gram / 14-ounce can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
4 garlic cloves, crushed
45 milliliters / 3 tablespoons olive oil
20 milliliters / 4 teaspoons coriander seeds, freshly ground
5 milliliters / 1 teaspoon ground allspice
300 milliliters / 1 1/3 cup tomato paste
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
30 milliliters / 2 tablespoons cilantro (a.k.a. fresh coriander) and/or parsley, chopped, plus more for garnish
200 grams / 1 1/3 cup feta cheese, crumbled, plus more for garnish

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C (390°F).

Place the zucchinis, eggplants, onions, green pepper, carrots, green beans and chickpeas into a large mixing bowl.

In a separate, small bowl, mix together the garlic cloves, olive oil, coriander seeds, ground allspice, tomato paste, salt and black pepper. Pour this dressing over the vegetables and toss well until all the vegetables are evenly coated. Transfer the vegetables to a large roasting tray and roast for 45-60 minutes until the vegetables are tender, giving the vegetables a stir after 30 minutes or so.

Stir in the cilantro and/or parsley and the feta cheese. Serve warm with extra fresh herbs and feta for garnish.

Tags: recipe, Morocco, turlu, vegetables, feta, Field to Feast, food blog, Africa