Finding My Groove | Eggplant, Salami + Gouda Sandwich

Having a baby and not wanting to cook came hand in hand. There were many things that I wanted to do in the little time I had when I wasn't carrying my child like, and I say this in all seriousness, showering. It took me a while to get back into it away from the cooking I had to get done for work every single day.  

We were faced with an issue at home. Do we really want to eat what I cooked for work? Do we just order in or do we find that little reserve of energy we had left to actually throw something together in less than a half hour? In the first year of our child's life, I don't think we really enjoyed any food. It was all for survival. We ate late, we ate crap but we ate.  

Things slowly started coming together. I started showering more often. I began looking less sallow. My cooking for work became routine and we started cooking things we wanted to eat; and it all began with soups, salads and sandwiches. Endless combinations, fulfilling flavors. Quick to eat and fun to make. Next time you find yourself in a rut, make a sandwich. This recipe was developed for Frico.    

Rustic Eggplant, Salami & Gouda Sandwich 

2 slices of gouda cheese
6 slices of eggplant 
3 cloves of garlic
4 slices of salami
4 large button mushrooms, sliced
4-6 fresh mint leaves 
1 cup of deseeded Kalamata olives
1/2 teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves
A handful of rocket leaves
1/2 tablespoon of lemon juice
2 thick slices of bread
1/4 cup of olive oil 
Black pepper, to taste
Salt, to taste

Blend the Kalamata olives with garlic, thyme, salt, pepper, lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of olive oil until smooth then set aside. 

Heat a frying pan then pour in the olive oil. Pan-fry the slices of eggplant after seasoning with salt and black pepper until golden on both sides. Remove from the oil then sauté the mushrooms in the same pan, seasoning with salt and black pepper. 

Toast the bread then coat with a thick layer of the prepared olive tapenade. Add the rocket leaves, slices of gouda, fried eggplant, salami and sautéed mushrooms. Top with mint leaves and freshly cracked black pepper. Serve. 

Note: this can also be assembled and toasted in a panini press. 

Browned Orzo Pudding

“Chili sauce? But where’s the ketchup?” I huffed and puffed at my bag of artery-blocking fries, limp after their trip to me on the back of a motorbike. Only having started to eat ketchup recently, I could not understand why my new home at the time, Kuala Lumpur, was not delivering on my need to fit into the ketchup-dunking French fry-eating globalized world of 2008. Surely I could not yet be expected to accustom my tongue to rojak (a mixture of fruit and a zingy shrimp paste dressing) when I was still so fresh off the Boeing.

When I ordered what I like to call the Cholesterol Special, I expected a thick double cheeseburger and fries with a side of the all-important pseudoplastic ketchup. No sweet chili sauces lay seductively in my fantasies and no downsized buns; but reality put them both in my path along with fried chicken that had none of the classic MSG-laden peppery KFC flavor. Instead, they were pushing something called “Tom Yum Crunch” for a limited time only that seemed to last for a lifetime and which was similar on your tongue to Chipsy’s unpleasant chili-lime flavor, industrial and heavy.

Now, let’s dismiss the fact that I was indulging in disgustingly corporate fast food in the largest of sizes, and in its place focus on the customization of fast food chains. Why couldn’t I find what I was looking for at a chain that was supposed to offer me the same product worldwide?

In my annoyance as a customer, I forgot about my background in advertising and that these corporations were willing to shake off some of their roots to embrace new cuisines thus achieving “market penetration” via bizarre offerings like the McArabia in the Middle East and the McSatay in Indonesia. It wasn’t their fault. I was just in the wrong “me” society — one that demands of companies to tailor their products to the culture to survive and dominate. I felt completely left out.

As featured in The Egypt Monocle

Amidst rethinking my relationship with ketchup and my taking it for granted at my neighborhood McDonald’s, I decided that I would teach myself to eat better, leap into the food culture that was presented to me and to eventually customize our own Egyptian recipes to tame, reinterpret or enhance the flavors for my Southeast Asian dinner guests.

This lasted a while and out of it came a remodeled koshari pasta dish without the added heaviness of the rice, a fillet of sole en papillote with dukkah, a brûléed lemon mehalabia and poached pears in spiced karkadeh among other things; but then it stopped and I became corporate, uniform, bland.

I took the easy way out: pesto pastas and brownie variations; recipes that you could easily find elsewhere; food that despite enjoying never became “me”. Like those fast food corporations, I did as I chose until I gained approval and found demand for ease, convenience and comfort.

So I’m slacking no longer, at least for as long as it lasts. I’m shaking up those old recipes I’m bored of and I’ll try not to be much of the staunch traditionalist that I’ve gradually become. I’ve already managed to embrace all the sweet chili sauces that have been thrown my way and will watch out for international interpretations of local favorites. Zooba in Zamalek has been doing it for a bit now and it’s about time we begin to experiment with what we’ve got, using the influx of new ingredients on the Egyptian market.

Browned Orzo Pudding

(Makes 4 small or 2 medium sized servings)
You’ll need:
½ cup of orzo
1 tablespoon of ghee
1½ cup of milk
¼ cup of sugar
3 large grains of mastic, crushed
½ a teaspoon of ground cloves
Zest of ¼ of an orange
1 heaped teaspoon of cornstarch + 3 tablespoons of cold water

In a medium-sized pot, melt the ghee on medium heat. When hot, add the orzo and fry in the ghee, stirring constantly until golden brown. Add the milk and bring to a gentle boil then turn your heat down, add the mastic, clove and orange zest then leave to simmer for around 7 minutes. Add the sugar and stir to incorporate. In a small bowl, add the cornstarch to the cold water and stir to dissolve. Pour your cornstarch mixture into the pot and again, stir to combine. Leave to cook for another 3 minutes or until the orzo is cooked through and al dente. The pudding should start to hold on the spoon. Pour into individual bowls and serve warm or refrigerate for at least an hour then serve cold.

Lunchbox Pasta: Pesto Pasta Salad

As featured in The Egypt Monocle

My lunch box was not a friend. I didn’t bond with it, would not look forward to hearing it snap open and found no pleasure in its content. Considering it a waste of my arm’s energy, I slugged it over to school reluctantly, with a new trick I had learned — the eye roll. The only thing I liked about it was that I’d choose a new one each year, reflecting my ever-morphing personality through brightly colored images glued onto boxed plastic.

In the first grade, I was dubbed a “cookie monster”, protesting against sandwiches until I was allowed to carry only cookies. That bit of excitement didn’t last long. The lunch box tradition died out as I got taller but a persistent packed lunch was shoved into my backpack pocket by mom; and when I’d return home, intact sandwich and bagged apple would be stuffed in secrecy into a deep corner of my desk, left to darken and rot.

Lunch boxes came back to haunt me in 2010. My two stepchildren, wanting to fit into their new school — a melting pot of nationalities, were heavily depending on me to do their lunch boxes justice, to compete with moms preparing tiffins packed neatly with fresh parathas, curried vegetables and a side of mango pickle. Sandwiches just weren’t going to do the trick when the kids are coming back with stories of snacking on seaweed with a Korean friend during recess.

So I pushed back with pasta salads, homemade burgers and juice boxes that doubled as ice packs on hot days; and on rainy days, a bowl of packed rice, slow-cooked beef and root vegetables then for later, a mini dessert muffin. On occasion, the leftover molokheyya would make an appearance, which apparently had been fed to many mouths hailing from different countries with the same plastic spoon.

It could be said that I am no one to encourage many Egyptian moms to put a little more thought into their kids’ lunchboxes because it may seem that I try hard only to compensate for the fact that I am not, in reality, my stepkids’ “real” mom. Yes, there is truth in that I am over-delivering, overreaching to try to please the hearts of two young ones that found themselves in my home, but what I have learned is that most children, when given the opportunity and the right circumstances, will enjoy a variety of different foods that we as adults might not think to feed them.

It’s tiring to see the same things on kids’ menus everywhere and now in their lunch boxes to replace the regular white bread Nutella sandwich — chicken nuggets, french fries and pizza. If Chinese children are gobbling up slices of baked tofu and wolfing down plates of kai-lan, and Indian children are scooping up mounds of coconut rice and fleshy bits from a fish head curry, what are we doing? If we’re a culture that enjoys eating so much, where is the depth? Why is there fear in training our children’s palate — an automatic “no, he/she won’t like this”?

What so many of us are sending to school is afterthought food, with little consideration of the boredom that ensues when eating the same things for a few long years. Here’s a different idea below and if you don’t like it, there are many other recipes and ideas on blogs and popular food websites about lunch boxes. Visit Lunchbox Blues, a blog where J.M. Hirsch chronicles 180 days of school meals as well as how his son grows to accept certain foods. You can go through Shirmiya’s blog, Happy Little Bento, where she outdoes us all with her delicate hand and creative presentation. If those don’t work for you, there’s always Googling “best lunch box ideas for kids”. Whatever it is, just do something different this school year.

Pesto Pasta Salad

You’ll need:
2 cups of dry pasta (around 200 grams)
½ cup of basil pesto
½ cup of peas, cooked (around 75 grams)
1 medium-sized colored pepper, thinly sliced
½ a cup of seeded black kalamata olives (around 90 grams)
3 tablespoons of almonds, roughly chopped (around 30 grams)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
The juice of half a lemon

Basil Pesto:
(Recipe adapted from Elise Bauer)
2 cups of basil leaves, fresh
⅓ cup of pine nuts
½ a cup of Roumy cheese, grated
½ a cup of olive oil
3 large garlic cloves, minced
Salt and pepper

To make the pesto:
Combine the garlic, basil leaves and pine nuts in a food processor and pulse several times. Drizzle the olive oil into the food processor while continuing to blend. Pour in a thin stream until finished. Pulse until smooth then add the salt, pepper and cheese. Pulse 2 more times before pouring out.

For the pasta:
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil then add your dried pasta. Cook until tender but firm. When done, drain and set the pasta aside. In a separate bowl, combine the peas, olives, colored pepper and almonds then add the pasta. Toss and store in an airtight container. Put the pesto and lemon juice into a separate covered container. Refrigerate both. Remove from the refrigerator when it is time to pack. Whisk the pesto and lemon juice together before pouring it over the pasta and accompanying vegetables. Toss gently and separate servings for packing.

Rave Reviews & a 3-Bean Salad

As featured in The Egypt Monocle

It is a rare occasion to find me visiting a Cairo restaurant based on a local review; but how much of this is my fault, this fear that I should not trust what is seemingly penned down without an afterthought? Do I skip over errors in technique descriptors and succumb to a world of uninteresting words that gives me nothing but cues that the reviewer cannot move past terms like “mouth-watering,” “amazing” and, I say this with a sigh, “perfect”?

Today, many Egyptians who have not stepped foot in a kitchen have decidedly taken on the online job of restaurant critic, with a virtuoso opinion that is customarily courteous and inclusive of the word “yummy,” that disregards the gray and congealed sauce that has been served atop a dry and under-seasoned steak.

It is known that the internet has opened doors to many who would in the 1980s have had no place to sound their voices. Food blogs and restaurant review aggregators have come to Egypt. We are now able to click through a multitude of links that invite us to eat at neighborhood restaurants through our screens and other people’s palates but most of the verbiage dedicated to restaurants ends up similar in style: dazzled amateurs happy with their cozy new positions, preferring not to write anything if they didn’t like the food.

It takes thick skin to tell the truth and most reviews have been ultimately forgiving about the food and service. On some days, the glorification and praise know no bounds and we are left to wonder how many of those favorable reviews are concealing a simple monthly fee.

There are ways to fix this doomed scenario we’re living in. It just takes some effort in between eating and kowtowing to the popular.

If you’re planning on becoming a published restaurant critic, begin to draw on your experiences as both an eater and a cook. If you have never cooked, get yourself into the kitchen and begin following tested recipes from reputable sources, both traditional and others with international flavors that may be fresh and unusual when paired. Learn what the world considers good.

Work on your writing skills; poorly constructed reviews will often be taken less seriously. Prove yourself through detailed pieces over a lengthy period of time. Visit the restaurant at least three times before liberally handing out your review, cover as many menu items as possible and check for consistency. If you’re going to be reviewing, no free meals should be accepted.

Do not hide behind your reviews claiming that you are only an amateur. If you’re regularly providing the market with reviews, you’ll need to get better. Recognize how hard the process can be: eating, having a critical opinion, maintaining anonymity at the restaurant, taking notes, revisiting and writing as honestly and intricately as possible to convey the atmosphere of said place.

Finally and for the love of our country, find a better word for “delicious.”

Three Bean Salad
You’ll need
70 grams edamame, shelled and cooked
90 grams black eyed peas, cooked
70 grams chickpeas, cooked
2 tablespoons of scallions, chopped
1 small onion, diced
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 medium red pepper, diced
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar
1½ tablespoon of vegetable oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

In a pot, boil some salted water and add the edamame in small handfuls. Cook for 4-5 minutes and drain in a colander. Set aside to cool. Once cool, remove from their shells and place in your salad bowl.

Prepare another pot of salted water. Place the black eyed peas in the water then bring it to the boil. Allow to boil for 3 minutes then lower the heat. Simmer for another 30 minutes then drain. When the black eyed peas have cooled, place them with the shelled edamame in the salad bowl.

If you’re using canned chickpeas, drain and rinse before using. If you’re using fresh, allow to soak overnight before cooking the next day. To cook, place them in a pot of cold water and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat immediately and simmer until tender and plump. Drain and cool. When they’ve lost some heat, add them to your salad bowl. Toss the beans together.

In a small bowl, mix together the sugar, vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, onions, scallions and garlic and pour over your salad. Mix and chill before serving.