Thursday 8 January 2009

Meze

'We're having meze - bring a contribution' they said.



Seemed a reasonable idea, so a bit of prodding around the internet (links in dish titles) found:

Ful medames - bean salad

A tin of borlotti beans (rinsed), lemon juice, crushed garlic, chopped cherry tomatoes, olive oil, cumin

worked quite well; the recipe said dill, I put some parsley in which worked OK

Piperies Xythates - marinated peppers

I don't even know what 'Bell Peppers' are, so used the long red sweetish ones; too sweet in the end, especially as the red wine vinegar I knew I had in the cupboard turned out to be raspberry flavoured. Anyway - peppers cut into strips, boiled for around 5 mins, marinated in the red wine vinegar for an hour, then covered in oilve oil.

Melitzanes Tiganites - aubergine in batter

Soda water batter? Not convinced, but had a bottle of fizzy water at work I could bring home and try (don't really hold with bottled water). Was also running out of flour, so batter ended up being very runny, too light. The aubergine was sliced, salted to get excess moisture out and dried, then fried for a few mins each side. A few got too burned to take to a social event, and went in the tiffin tin whilst stil hot so ended up soggy rather than crispy, but mostly worked.

An ideal use for the tiffin tin, brought back from (ahem) Jaipur years and years ago. Dramatic to arrive with, although the dishes need to be put on a plate (as the base of each is the lid of the one below) and needed to be carried wrapped in a carrier bag, as it doesn't entirely deal to hold the oil etc in... ;-)

So - non-local & seasonal food, often the nature of having food from other cultures, but interesting to make, and a rare example of me following recipes. ;-)

3 comments:

Llosgi said...

All sounds yummy Simon. I copied a sort-of Ful Mesdames meal from a wonderful take-away stall in Bristol called Falafel King. Make an adzuki bean stew with plenty of cumin, heat pittas, line them liberally with hummus, ladle in some hot stew and add lemon juice on top. Delicious. I made this when Bristol hosted the climate camp gathering a couple of years back and we had 18 people to sleep over in our little house! I think we got through 40 pittas that night!

Simon said...

good, filling, hot food you can make in bulk is a wonderful thing. I've got a great booklet from the Anarchist Teapot cafe lot in Brighton that I'm hoping will save me in any such situation...

Llosgi said...

That hot bulk food is affectionately known in our family as 'vegan hippy-slop'.
Do you ever hear the phrase 'Is it Kev?' I picked this up in my daughter's house where I learnt that it means 'Is it vegan?' (Kevin Keegan = vegan). Now even my mum tells me "It's ok, it's kev"!