yassa.

Above: De Ceuvel. Below: America, O'Neill's basement last night.

The recipe: good the first night, wayyyy better the second day, this would fit right in with any kind of Caribbean menu. Super good if one is a fan of the habanero and the mustard being together what language is this.

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yassa (senegalese chicken in lemon, mustard, and scotch bonnet). 

marinade
3 boneless chicken breasts, cut lengthwise into strips
2 red scotch bonnet peppers, seeded and veined
juice of a lemon
8 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tsp smoked salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper or black peppercorns
2 tbsp olive oil

sauce
1 large or 2 small onions, finely chopped (about 2 cups)
1 cup coarse-grained mustard
1/4 olive oil
juice of a lemon
3 bay leaves
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
salt and pepper to taste
handful of cilantro, chopped

shakshouka.

Shakshouka. A good thing to do for a warming breakfast if you've made too much red sauce for your previous two days' Italian needs (yesterday's arancini risotto and the day before's unprecedented chicken parm casserole).

To your remaining red sauce, add a bunch of toasted cumin seed, dried thyme, and some crushed red pepper. Cook it down some, ten minutes or so, then lay a couple of eggs in there (make wells first if you want them to look pretty), cover, and cook for 4 minutes for still-runny yolks or until eggs are set to your liking. Throw some chopped cilantro, crumbled feta and pul biber on there afterwards and blast your sinuses out. The Wikipedia article says that you can/should even serve it with zhoug, which next time I maybe will.

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Chronology break: Day Two of shakshouka (after the Top Chef Brazil dream) was decorated with a pesto that I'd pestled up out of wilting arugula (1 cup), nearly stale pistachios (1/4 cup) and spotty basil (1/4 cup), plus garlic (3 cloves), salt and olive oil (to taste). Even better than the first day, fresh garlic and herbs bring a nice zing.

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orange you glad i didn't say asian again.

Turmeric Quest 2013 still in progress, but even I as a true lovvver of most things Asian am needing the occasional break from the normal Indonesian-Thai-Vietnamese-Japanese-Burmese-Cambodian-Sri Lankan-etc stuff we cook over here.

And yet. Trying to eat orange stuff like turmeric but also squash and sweet potatoes, I'm sure you know why. And kale, you know why, everybody does. And prunes, you probably think you know why, but it's just because I've had this bag of them sitting around forever and it's time to start fresh and begin ignoring a brand-new bag of prunes.  

Thus, if not Asian, toward what cuisine do we steer our mighty kitchen spatula. Have you noticed I'm not using question marks anymore. It's more blasé that way, like I don't even care if "you" answer. More rhetorical. I've also put sarcastic exclamation marks "on pause". Quotation marks, unfortunately not (yet), and parentheses are still going pretty strong. And I'm still really likely to use more than one colon in a sentence, probably all of them incorrectly. Progress (implied question mark). 

The answer to my extremely rhetorical and questionably punctuated moronic question turned out to be: Moroccan, ish. In the end though, by the time I got around to turning on the stove I just really didn't have it in me anymore so I just scorched/steamed a chicken breast, threw some cilantro at it and dipped it in harissa, almost the same thing. The squash is still roasting, it's 9:45pm. A recipe for tomorrow's usage of tonight's detritus will eventually emerge from the shambles below. 

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calico tagine. 

100-200g leftover chicken
1 or 2 fried or hard-boiled egg(s)

2 or 3 cups kale, chopped pretty fine
1 or 2 cups butternut squash, roasted with smoked salt, cinnamon, and cumin seed

7 or 14 prunes, soaked, keep the water

handful almonds, toasted, chopped

pinch powdered ginger or ras el hanout

teaspoon cumin seed

a good bit of cinnamon

an assload of harissa, ok i used 2 tbsp 

extra-virgin olive oil if there's not already some from the squash or chicken
salt or feta if you're eating dairy
freshly cracked pepper to taste
a sprinkle of smoked paprika if you're in the mood
toasted sesame seeds

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fassoulia.

Went into the center yesterday for a drinkie-poo and some sun with the Moop and the KK, ended up on the Leliegracht at Spanjer & Van Twist, where I think I have never ever been before. Pleasant enough place to drink and chat, though in terms of food I'm not sure it would ever be wise to venture beyond the "fried" portion of the menu.

That little neck of the woods sure is picaresque (sic) though. OK, here are some options for tonight's North African-Jewish idea, another Saveur ripoff.

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boulettes de poisson.

400g cod or haddock
½ cup very finely chopped almonds, or almond flour
¼ cup finely chopped parsley
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp ground ginger
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 egg, lightly beaten
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2 tbsp butter
3 tbsp tomato paste
2 cups stock (I used chicken)
2 cups whole, peeled canned tomatoes with juice, crushed
1 tsp sugar, plus more to taste
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 tsp crushed red chile flakes (I used pul biber)
1/2 tsp ground allspice

1/2 cup chopped cilantro for serving

I served it with buttered rice, yogurt probably would've been good too. These were the "meatiest" fishballs I've ever encountered, not in a bad way.

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fassoulia (long-cooked green beans in tomato sauce).

1 large onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 tsp garlic powder
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp cumin
400g fresh string beans or runner beans
1 can diced tomatoes (2 cups or so)
1 cup beef or vegetable broth
salt and pepper

Cook for 45 minutes.

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aci biber sosu.

Sooooooooo, yeah. That's pretty fucked up looking. My breath is fucked up as well. I did end up making that amazing Maoz-centric idea I had last night, but didn't take a picture til today, that's it above looking like this awful Dr. Oetker cookbook someone gave us 15 years ago, or we possibly stole, or found, it was called Modern German Cooking I think. Unbelievably hideous food photography, like everything was photographed in a morgue with fluorescent lights.

But I swear those mint leaves just landed like that. They didddddd!!!

What we're looking at is minus last night's pickled beets and cucumbers, it's: those supergarlicky Tunisian carrots with cumin, ginger and olives (the orange stuff), plus the garlicky Yemeni zhoug (the green stuff), which is outrageously good, plus a slightly thicker version of that garlicky Turkish tahinli tarator (the beige stuff), plus I swear randomly scattered mint, plus "the spicy-ass red stuff", which is this:

Last night I had all of the above with a little shoarma-seasoned steak and it RAAWWWWWKED, but: today, no steak, add the missing beets and cukes and this is possibly the best vegan thing I've ever smashed into my face (no yogurt). It's Maoz at home. And, coolly, it combines contributions from three continents, but I guess that's how the Ottoman/Arab world rolls. More details after accomplishing something(s).

UPDATE: A day later I made this to play along with everyone else and it was realllllllly good: Roasted Cauliflower with Tahini Dressing.

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good evening.

Mara just reminded me that one time in high school she threw up on a cop at a U2 concert. Jägermeister.

Above: Westerpark this morning at 9am. Tonight's dinner: beet carpaccio. Moroccan chicken wings. Some kind of salad with a faux-bacon dressing or if that fails then maybe this tahini dressing that we haven't made in a while.

The fennel seed in these wings makes for nice little surprising bursts of flavor.

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moroccan chicken wings.

3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp cayenne
Juice of one lemon
an extra sprinkling of salt

Oven at 200C. Place chicken in a single layer on a roasting pan. Cook for 30 minutes until chicken is tender, then increase heat to 250 and cook for an additional 5 to 10 minutes, until chicken is crispy and caramelized.

theme, variations.

This is closely related to the carrot thing I made the other day, but it's in a different, probably more easily servable configuration: veggies roasted instead of boiled, and then diced instead of mashed. I tried it with roasted garlic instead of raw this time and a few other tweaks, it's still good, though if not as ka-BLAM! as the other recipe, it's much less of a Breath Destroyer for sure. It's like the older brother of the other thing.

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tunisian roasted vegetable salad.

carrots
parsnips
EVOO
garlic
salt
pepper

cumin
caraway
harissa
a lemon
argan oil or another less healthy, more affordable oil
fresh mint, chopped
salt
pepper

Roast vegetables and garlic. Let cool. Dice, combine with rest of ingredients. I served mine at room temperature.

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omi houriya.

Woo! Just crashed this together to see if it was worth bringing to a HBF/tc + J-Kim potluck on Sunday (I love the complex equation those two have become.....ohhhhh I mean their CB handles of course not their real selves aaahahahhhh ha ha xoxoxoxox).

Ohhhhh but seriously folks. It is. Worth bringing. This tastes very very much like the butt-kicking carrots from Maoz Falafel, a total total Breath Destroyer but yeah no one's smelling mine tonight are (is) they.

The recipe below is pretty much verbatim from Claudia Roden's New Book Of Middle Eastern Food from 1972 (at least the ingredient list is verbatim, my instructions are on the curt and cryptic side), a book which almost never lets me down. The only change I made was to add both cumin and caraway, she suggested either, but I like the occasional surprise of a caraway seed.

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omi houriya (tunisian carrot salad).

700gr carrots (the recipe called for "old carrots", I used winterpeen)
salt

4 tbsp EVOO
3 tbsp good vinegar, I used apple cider
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp harissa
1 tsp or more ground cumin
1/2 tsp caraway seed
1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 cup or more feta or hirtenkase, crumbled
16 green olives, quartered or finely chopped
possibly a little pomegranate molasses for drizzling, or sumac for sprinkling

Peel carrots, cut into big pieces. Boil in salted water til tender. Drain. Mash. Add the rest of everything through the ginger and combine. Garnish with feta and olives. Serves 6-8.

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sour grape.

I wish y'all could've heard how quiet it was outside my window at 8:45pm tonight. Odd, I thought. Granted, it's Tuesday, but it's a pretty busy streetcorner, and the Dirk closes at 9pm so lots of people are usually dashing in and out before closing.

I myself was planning on dashing in and out to get the usual (cat food and buttermilk), so I decided to take advantage of this apparent lull in the action. I raced out of the apartment (then back into the apartment to get my housekeys), hurtled down the stairs, only to find: the Dirk was closed.

Closed early on account of World Cup football. And I was the only person on the street. The weird thing was, the air was permeated with the smell of "nearly-drunk person's breath". You know the smell, a smell you can often smell only if you yourself have not been drinking, which I hadn't: it's not just the smell of alcohol, it's the smell of a drinking person's breath after their sixth beer or so. It was a bit disorienting, like that (still pretty-effective) film cliche of seeing a still-lit cigarette dangling in the ashtray of an empty room.

And then, walking to De Trusty Avondmarkt for my shopping items, I passed our corner bar's outside terrace, which was simply thronged with a fire-c0de-violation's worth of orange-colored people outside, 75, 100 maybe, it's not a big terrace, all of them fixedly watching a precariously-perched giant TV in utter silence (there's not usually a TV outside there). Aside from the buzz of vuvuzelas onscreen and some hushed commentary from the announcers, it was totally silent. People were just watching. And exhaling a lot, I guess.

11:00pm. Silence no more. Vuvuzelas, which the cats do not like. Every kind of car horn imaginable. Pairs of men yelling in tandem as if dead-lifting several thousand kilos at the Olympics while some monstrously-spiked alien viciously gnaws its way through their bowels. Actually I'm pretty sure an alien attack would be quieter.

This sounds pretty cranky. Here's a true statement: Holland is the only team I want to win the World Cup right now, and I hope they do.

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Speaking of loud, Andy's having a party tomorrow. And his parties are loud, because Andy's deaf. And it's not only a party, some visiting Ethiopians are playing live. And I should make something, if for no other reason than to get rid of several of these 3,000 green olives I have. I'm thinking of this, possibly optionally (I love adverbs) drizzled with that great tahini-buttermilk-sriracha dressing from the other day.

UPDATE: This is really a great way to use up green olives. It's like you can't add too many (foreshadowing?)!!! It's pretty perfect right now so I'm afraid to fuck it up, but of course I want to add all of the other Moroccan possibilities to it to see what happens.

UPDATE 2: I did fuck it up...but the leftovers were awesome with a can of tuna thrown in it. More research and a recipe rewrite necessary.

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(tuna with) carrots, green olives, pomegranate, orange, mint.

1kg carrots, peeled, cut on diagonal into 1/4-inch-thick slices

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil or if your olive oil is boring try a smart mix of tahini and olive oil
1/4 fresh lemon juice or some equivalent amount pomegranate molasses
1 tbsp grated orange zest, minced
1 tbsp ground coriander (I was skeptical but this works)

4 balls of stemgember, crushed/pressed (ehh...I explain)
possibly a drizzle of honey
1 cup drained chopped pitted brine-cured green olives
1 cup chopped green onions

1/2 cup cilantro

1/2 cup mint

Makes a lot.

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pound for a brown.

What a strange summer it's being so far. Nothing feels perfectly normal. Kind of like these are the sentences I am writing.

Know what I mean? Everything's just a little off. Or maybe this is normal June limbo and I'm just usually too busy having beers in the sun to notice the subtle shifts toward summer shutdown.

As if to underscore the slight weirdness of things, we had D/K over at 3pm yesterday. Why then? Originally it was conceived as an afternoon on the roof, in the as-blazing-as-possible-in-Amsterdam sun, carelessly drinking bitter/fruity Pimm's cups, laughing gaily, and grilling an unfortunate victim or two. But then the weather turned against us and we were stuck inside with our fruity drinks and our summer food.

On the other hand: there are worse things. My Ethiopian Chicken Leg Experiment was let down by some flabby chicken, but I totally enjoyed chomping on our Emergency Appetizer and Mara's not-too-sweet brownies.

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My originally-planned starter was called yeshimbra assa, a Lenten dish from Ethiopia made from chickpea fritters cut into fish shapes and covered in a thick berbere-based sauce (recipe 1, recipe 2). But when I grabbed the full-looking bag of chickpea flour this morning, I found it to be not very full at all, and Sunday is not the day to need chickpea flour.

The good news about a day of retracted ambition is that you don't even remotely panic about unplanned changes. OK, so we have no fish-shaped chickpea fritters. What can I has? Trying to keep things African, Moop and I sort of commandeered this Tunisian salad and bent it to our needs, slightly tweaked and served as crostini with a boost of sriracha mayo.

And then later I ate too many brownies. You would've done the same thing, believe me.

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salade mechouia.

2 or 3 red, orange, or yellow bell peppers, diced

2 or 3 medium onions, diced

4 tbsp light olive oil

1/4 cup capers

juice of a lemon

1 can of tuna, drained

2 eggs, hard-boiled

1 baguette, crostini-ized

Coat onions and peppers with oil and roast for one hour in a 175C oven, turning every 15 minutes or so, and reducing the heat to 150C if you're getting too much blackening. At some point, whip together a little sriracha mayo (2 tbsp mayo + 1-2 tsp sriracha, mixed). When peppers and onions are completely soft and a bit browned, remove from oven, cool, and add tuna, lemon juice, and capers.

To assemble: a quick slather of sriracha mayo, a tbsp or so of tuna/pepper/onion mix, then top with hardboiled egg and a chive if, like us, you're a sucker for The Chive Garnish.

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cocoa brownies.

150 grams unsalted butter

1 1/2 cups raw/unrefined sugar
3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 170°C. Line the bottom and sides of a tart pan with parchment paper or foil, leaving an overhang on two opposite sides.

Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set the bowl in a wide skillet of barely simmering water. Stir from time to time until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and rather hot but not bubbling. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is only warm, not hot.

Stir in the vanilla with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each one. When the batter looks well-blended, add the flour and stir until thoroughly incorporated, then beat vigorously for another minute or so. Spread evenly in the lined pan.

Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack.

Lift up the ends of the parchment or foil liner, and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Cut into fun shapes, or squares if that's how you're feeling.

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down in the south.

It's been under consideration for some time now, but I think I'm finally ready to begin trying to learn something about Ethiopian/Eritrean cooking. The spur in my haunch is probably Andy's approaching birthday, which will sport a marked Ethiopian focus due to visiting Ethiopians doing the cooking and providing the live tuneage. Also our friend Big Ron is going to Addis for a month this summer, etc. Like that.

So here are some resources:

• Saveur article (cut/pasteable recipes here, though I have no idea why anyone would want to do that)
• This looks an awful lot like the Chris Schlesinger recipe I've been thinking about doing, plus the sambussa looked interesting.
• I get a creepy vibe from this website, but there are step-by-step videos and shit. In case I've forgotten how to stir or something.

First steps: berberé drumsticks and nit'r qibe runner beans.

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out in the streets.

Start the presses: I'm planning to go out to dinner, finally hitting Fenan Klein Afrika on Thursday with a whole pile-up of homies.

Other than that, no plans for forseeable future, and that sounds great.

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REVIEWETTE: I thought the food at Fenan was sufficiently interesting, diverse, and inexpensive to easily warrant one or more return visits. Certainly one of the better Eritrean/Ethiopian restaurant meals I've had, primarily due to the distinctive spicing across a range of 10 or 12 dishes: nothing really tasted like anything else on the (large) plate. And as always seems to be the case at Ethiopian places: lovely people.

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