Lebanon, the verdict

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make everything on the list this time, due to lots of local travel and increased working hours.

We enjoyed what we did get to, particularly the hommus and beef and the abundance of salads. It was a week of fresh and healthy (ish) food, quick and easy and perfect for making after work.

If you haven’t yet, and you live in Melbourne you should definitely come on over and check out Brunswick and Coburg for their multitude of great Lebanese restaurants and delicious vegan snacks.

 

Mezze two

On Mezze night number two, we had pumpkin kibbeh, tabouli, bean dip, flat bread chips, and fried tempeh kibbeh. Overall, it was delicious, and I have to say I’m pretty proud of my new creation, the fried tempeh kibbeh.

The pumpkin Kibbeh was bought from the Middle East Bakery on Hope st. I just happened upon them in the freezer while I was looking for the ill-fated felafel. They are vegan, and cooked straight from frozen, so they’re quick and hard to stuff up, which is always a winning combination.

I picked the bean dip after a cursory net serach about Lebanese food. I have since discovered that it is not Lebanese, but Egyptian. For that I apoligse. However I did make it, because it is what I had the ingredients for, and I have to say it was very yummy.  I used this recipe from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, and served it with vegetable crudites and flat bread chips.

Bean dip with capsicum, carrot and snow peas from our garden

I made the tabouli from a recipe in Arak and Mezze (available from the Moreland Libraries), however I overestimated the amount of parsley I had left so it was a little heavy on the burghul.

As tasty as all of this was, the main event was the tempeh kibbeh. I made these up because we had some tempeh that needed using, and I wanted to try my hand at veganising the meat kibbeh I always see at Lebanese restaurants.

Pumpkin kibbeh to the right, Tempeh Kibbeh on the left

Vegan Tempeh Kibbeh

• 250 g tempeh, mashed
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• 3 tablespoons of soaked burghul
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp cumin
• pinch cayenne pepper
• 2 chopped spring onions
• salt, to taste
• oil, for frying

1. With your hands, mash all ingredients together very well, until there are very few tempeh lumps left. If it is too dry, add a little oil. If it is too wet, add some more bread crumbs.
2. Taste the mixture, add salt if necessary.
3. Roll the mixture into balls.
4. Deep fry the balls in batches, in a wok or deep fryer. You could also bake the balls in the oven for a lighter dish.
5. Serve with bread and salad.

 

Pizza

I used to love Lebanese pizza, but it has been a long time since I’ve had any, given it is usually covered cheese.

Lebanese pizza looks like other pizza, though the dough is covered in Zatar (a mix of oregano and spices) with only one or two other toppings added.

I cheated, which is the theme of the week really, and used zatar bread bought at my local Middle East Bakery, on Hope st. We picked a few toppings, based on what we’d seen at Tabets on the non-veg pizzas.

The results were:

Tomato, sundried tomato and capers,

Tomato pizza

Mince pizza,

Mince and capsicum

and Cheezly with olives and tomatoes, not pictured.

Zatar pizza made for a quick and delicious meal. Using pre-baked Zatar means you get a cripsy pizza, and you need to use pre-cooked or no-cook toppings. You could make your own dough to get a softer base.

 

Mezze 1

• Babaganoyj (eggplant)
• Tomato salad
• chickpea dip with “beef”
• potato kibbeh

The list above is what I had intended to make for our first mezze night. It didn’t work out exactly as I had hoped though.

First to make the babaganoyj (spelling taken from the book I used, but there seem to be a few ways). The recipe, from the book Arak and Mezze: The Taste of Lebanon, said to put the whole eggplant in the oven and roast it, turning, until the skin was brown. It seemed unlikely to happen in the 5 minutes prescribed, but I gave it a go. It took 15 minutes, but it did get there, to my relief.

Next was to scoop out the flesh and mash it. As I sliced into the eggplant I could sense there might be a problem – it was a really, really seedy one. I was supposed to remove the seeds, but there were just too many, so I left them in. I then tried to mash it, only to find that some of it was better cooked than other parts.

I tried to keep on, and added the tahini, lemon juice, etc, but in the end it was a seedy, uneven, overwhelmingly-tahini-flavoured mush, that just didin’t work. Even Mr thought it was a bit crap, and he eats just about anything. I didn’t get a photo before it was added to the compost, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Ah well, on to the potato kibbeh and tomato salad.

However, I got home, looked through the pantry and realised I didn’t actually buy any potatoes or sour cream (for the tomato salad).

So, onwards and upwards I turned my hand to making cauliflower kibbeh instead. Kibbeh, in this context, seems to mean mashed something with burghul. So, I steamed and mashed and soaked and salted, and it turned out like this:

Kibbeh, tastes much less bland than it looks

A very yummy use of my second favourite vegetable.

For the salad, I just cut up tomatoes, marinated them in lemon juice and sumac, then mixed them with cucumber, parsley and some spinach from our garden. Yum.

Tomato salad, Keira-style

The last part of our meal was the best, and certainly the easiest, due to some cheating on my part.

We had hommus with “beef”, however I used bought hommus from Aldi (perhaps the best bought hommus in Australia) and Sanitarium mince, so it was pretty easy. This was tasty, filling, and a little different than our usual use of hommus, so I’ve added the recipe for you to recreate some fast food at home.

Hommus with "beef" and pine nuts

Easy-Peasy Cheaters’ Vegan Hommus with Beef

• 250g Hommus
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped finely
• 1 packet Sanitarium (or other) vegan mince
• 1/2 tsp fennel powder
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 2 tbsp dried parsley flakes
• salt and pepper to taste

1. In a dry pan toast the pine nuts. Watch them closely, as they burn easily. Put aside.
2. In the same pan heat some olive oil, and cook the onion for 5-10 minutes, until translucent.
3. Add the mince, and mash with a fork.
4. Stir the spices through, and add salt to your tastes.
5. Remove from heat, stir the pine nuts through.
6. On a serving plate, arrange the hommus in a ring, with a well in the middle. Put the mince and pine-nut mixture into the ring. Serve with vegetables and flat bread.

Felafel – my fail, and some reviews

Felafel is a vegan staple, for Melbournians at least, as its widely available and always vegan (so long as you remember to hold off on the yoghurt and garlic sauce).

We buy it when we can’t be bothered to cook, but we also make it at home sometimes, albeit from a packet mix.

I had intended to make it from scratch, but that really wasn’t going to help me with my new lack of kitchen time. So, this time, I bought the frozen ones from the Middle Eastern Bakery on Hope st.

I rushed out of the house the morning of intended felafel night, pulling them from the freezer for Mr, who had agreed to make the dinner that night. I briefly glimpsed a warning on the packet, “this product should be defrosted in…”. I assumed fridge, and put them in. I should have actually read the packet.

That night I got home, with bought hommus (SUPER slack week), to find Mr in the kitchen, none to happy.Turns out it does not say to defrost them in the freezer, it says to defrost them in a collander. Because they get soggy if you don’t, and then they don’t fry. In fact, it makes them fall to pieces and turn into felafel crumbs, like this:

Fall-apart Felafel

So, that’s how we managed to stuff up frozen felafel. They did turn out yummy nonetheless, though next time I’ll go back to using the Orgran mix, which is fail-proof.

The rest o it worked though. Yummy tomatoes, fresh bread, Aldi hommus (the King of bought hommus, IMHO), and greens from the garden.

A quick tip for newbies – When you lay the bread out, rip it gently along the edges so that you end up with two disks. Offset these a little, then add the filling and roll up. I often wondered why my felafel rolls dripped, and so I paid close attention to the people at the Middle East Restaurant. This is what they do, and it works

Bread in two pieces stops drips

I thought I had taken a photo of the finished felafel, but clearly i didn’t. Sorry

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If you’re feeling really slack, or want to pretend that felafel isn’t deepfried (you can’t deny the truth if you make them at home), you can always go out. Here are my top three picks for Brunswick/Coburg felafel.

Middle East Restaurant, Sydney Road. I can’t find the address for this at the moment, but its the sit-down restaurant above Moreland road, on the East side of the street, that claims to have the best vegetarian felafel. This shop is my pick if you love the trimmings – pickels, tabouli, tahini sauce, and lots of chilli, as well as Tamarind drink to wash it down with.

Pit Stop Kebab, cnr Moreland rd and Sydney rd. This place makes toasted felefel rolls, without pickels, but with the added benefit of having vegan hot chips and wonderful home made dolmades. Yum!

Aghadeer, Sydney road, west side, near Moreland road. Aghadeer does your basic felafel – tabouli, tomato and onion with hommus. Its open more often that Pit Stop though, and you get to listen/watch singing and dancing that is usually going on in the function room behind.

 

Introducing: Lebanon!

First up, sorry for the gap in posting. I have a full time job again now, working up to the Vic election, and its taking up most of my posting time Readers can probably expect more gaps over the next 47 days.

This week we have been cooking and eating Lebanese food. I say we, because now that I’m working somenights, Mr is doing some of the cooking. I say “have been” because I’ve been super sack at posting, and am more than a week behind! There’s a whole country we’ve done at home that I haven’t even told you about!

This is an easy one for us. We ordinarily eat a lot of Lebanese (and similar) food, because we live in a suburb with lots of Lebanese restaurants, grocers, bakeries and felafel joints. This means we get zatar wraps with salad on the weekend, we eat felafel when we can’t be bothered to cook, we get great spice mixes, breads, and frozen felafel or felafel mix, and zatar bread has become a car trip tradition. Brunswick really is a yummy place to live.

About Lebanon – where is it?

Lebanon is in the middle east, on the Mediterranean Sea, and borders Syria to the north and west, and Israel to the south. The capital Beirut is approximately in the middle of the coast.

About Lebanon – people and economy

• Population: 4,017,095
• Median age: 29.4
• Life expectancy at birth: 73.66 years
• Birth rate: 1.78 children born per woman
• Religions: Muslim 59.7% (Shia, Sunni, Druze, Isma’ilite, Alawite or Nusayri), Christian 39% (Maronite Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Chaldean, Assyrian, Copt, Protestant), other 1.3%
• Languages: Arabic (official), French, English, Armenian
• Literacy: Male 93.1% Female 82.2%
• Suffrage: all men at age 21, women with elementary education at age 21. Those in the army can’t vote.
• GDP per capita: $13 200
• Unemployment rate: 9.2%

Did you know…?

Lebanon entered the Eurovision song contest in 2005, but had to withdraw as there was an Israeli contestant and Lebanese law prevents and Lebanese television station from showing Israeli content. The station received a three year ban, and there have been no moves from the country to enter again.

The Menu

This may look a little involved, but most of the food is easy and quick to prepare.

• Babaganoyj (eggplant)
• Tomato salad
• chickpea dip with “beef”
• potato kibbeh
• pumpkin kibbeh
• tabouli
• ful medames
• batata harara
• lentils and rice
• tomato kibbeh
• zatar
• pizza
• felafel

I’d say wish us luck, but we’ve already made half of this list. That said, as you’ll see, we could have used the luck this week!