It’s a great time to be cooking at home, and while I’m working on my own Self-Isolation Cookbook, I’ve also been reviewing other cookbooks. The latest is SHUK: From Market to Table, the Heart of Israeli Home Cooking by Eimat Admony and Janna Gur.
Long before all this COVID-19 craziness happened, I threw a dinner party and made four recipes from the book:
Masabacha, a warm chickpea dip that’s soupier than hummus and has whole chickpeas on top of a warm, spicy tahini sauce
Harissa Fish: a spicy tomato braised fish dish
Quinoa-Stuffed Beets: exactly as it sounds, with date dressing
and Orange Blossom-Scented Roast Chicken and Potatoes: marinated chicken with a whole orange stuck inside for moisture
The only dish that flopped was the quinoa-stuffed beets. It was fussy to make and the beet flavour overpowered the harissa and leek stuffing and the lemon and date molasses cooking liquid. The quinoa also ended up crunchy, since it’s supposed to cook in the beets, but didn’t seem to absorb any of the liquid in the oven. I ended up eating the beets plain and tossing the filling when it came out of the oven.
But that masabacha! It’s a great example of what this book does well: takes rich food and makes it beautiful. Take tons of olive oil and tons of tahini and add freshly cooked chickpeas with some lemon, cumin, chile and garlic and it’s going to be delicious. But it’s a variation on hummus that most North Americans don’t see and it seems a little more fancy. To lighten it up, I used lettuce leaves instead of bread to scoop it up. It was the perfect appetizer, and could have been a lunch on its own, though my stomach felt pretty full after a few giant spoonfuls, and there were two more courses to come with dinner.
The harissa fish was exceptional, but that might have been because I used my homemade harissa (made from an old recipe in Preserving by Oded Schwarz). Tomato paste, harissa, tons of garlic, cumin, caraway, paprika and cheery tomatoes, then you tuck the fish fillets into the sauce and simmer. Simple. Lip-tinglingly spicy. Delicious.
And the Orange Blossom-Scented Roast Chicken and Potatoes. I made this mostly because I wanted to use my date molasses, aka silan, which I’d run all around Montreal in search of and eventually bought three different brands to compare (they all worked for this recipe, fyi…). I loved this recipe because the sugar in the silan and the orange juice caramelizes the exterior of the chicken as it roasts, and the orange flavour sinks into the starchy, oily potatoes that cook below the chicken in its juices. It’s the ultimate roast chicken comfort dish. And there are just a few ground spices, so not a big grocery list. You can use honey in place of silan and if you skip the orange blossom water, no one’s going to care. Honestly, I couldn’t really notice it. It’s pretty subtle. I know most people probably throw out the whole orange that roasts inside the chicken, but I love it. The fibres break down and it’s incredibly juicy, whether you halve it or keep it whole.
So I fell a little in love with this cookbook, but then something funny happened. I went back to see what I’d like to make next and nothing really appealed to me. Either it had dairy (I’m lactose intolerant) like the yogurt and frozen grape soup or required an ingredient I didn’t feel like hunting down (e.g. bamba, a salty-savoury snack with gluten that I couldn’t eat anyway, or dried amba powder, which the book says to order online – it’s dry mango, though, so I wonder if I could buy dried mango and grind it in a spice grinder…). Or the ingredients just aren’t in season now (watermelon, figs, eggplant). Or they’re just too rich and heavy (short rib, white bean and chard stew, chicken maqloubeh rice).
I do want to make the grilled whole fish with zaatar chimichurri and the grilled lamb kebabs, eventually. They seem simple and tasty, which this book does well. And if I wanted to try my hand at couscous from scratch, there are plenty of instructions for that, which I appreciate.
For now, I think I’ll just enjoy the gorgeous photos of Israeli markets and herbs and travel from my living room couch to a foreign land, since I won’t be jumping on an airplane any time soon. #culinarytourism #postCovid19
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