I hate salads that taste like a pile of grass. I'm more of a caesar salad person - sure, I like some leaves, but I prefer them crunchy, and then I want a whole heap of non-salad items in there, like bacon, eggs, bread and cheese. Or maybe a complete lack of leaves, like in a greek salad - again, with the cheese, and something tangy like olives. But just don't serve me weeds - ugh.
This region has a famous salad, and I'd never heard of it before I arrived - but now I order it everywhere. I'm on my own special mission to find the best Fattoush (also fatoush, fattush and probably a myriad of other spellings) that can be found in Dubai. So far, it's a war between Bayt al Wakeel on the Bur Dubai side of the creek in the middle of the Old Souk, and Tagine, at the One and Only Royal Mirage.
Fattoush's wonderful addition is fried bread. It's like an arabic crouton, but better, and I make mine in the oven and they taste just as good. These croutons are so awesome, I eat half of them before I even make the salad. But the salad is pretty good too - it's fresh, aromatic, colourful and crunchy.
Living in the Middle East is a dream for a spice lover. It is of course, smack in the middle of traditional spice trails, and the trading hub for all the fragrant and piquant treasures of this world. Baharat, Sumac, Saffron, Cardamom, Oud, Roses, Za'atar. The list goes on. A trip to the spice souk of Dubai is a must for any traveller (not to buy spices - they are cheaper at the hypermarkets) to immerse oneself in the origins of this port. Dubai started as a trading town, and pearls, spices and gold were the objects of desire, and the Souks still bear hints of the traditional Middle East that has been lost everywhere else in this shiny city.
Za'atar is both Arabic for Thyme, and also the name of a spice blend that includes thyme, and usually marjoram, oregano, sesame, salt and sumac. Here, you can find it everywhere - in plastic packets on the supermarket shelves, in hessian sacks at the souks, on flat bread with melted cheese, in croissants, on the table next to the salt. It's a zingy, herbaceous mix that goes with almost everything - it can be added to a lamb stew, a fish marinade, a breakfast frittata, sprinkled on a pizza, but one of my favourites is simply on pastry, and oven baked for about 10 minutes - it makes a superb finger food, and is wonderful dipped in minted labneh (thick yogurt that tastes a little like tzatziki).
I've always been more of a non-recipe cook. Don't get me wrong - I love cookbooks, but after years of working in restaurants alongside chefs - some great, some mediocre, I have realized that once you develop some basic knowledge, and learn to trust your taste buds, anyone is capable of inventing a recipe (implementing it is another matter!)
I am a great 'surprise chef'. I can walk into any kitchen and prepare a meal - often a great one, if I try, out of almost anything. You know how MacGyver used to make a nuclear warhead out of a ball point pen, two batteries, a paperclip and a piece of gum? That's me in the kitchen. The only thing that has held me up has been baking. It has always stood on a pedestal as the unmuckable cooking. Hard-core recipe stuff. I think it was several early failed attempts at pavlova and anzac biscuits that did it.
But what I've realised recently is that baking - particularly cakes - does not need to be as exact as I thought. Sure, there are things that MUST be included. Eggs to bind, oil or butter for moistness, some kind of raising agent for cakes, sugar for taste. The quantites are variable. More eggs for a dense cake, less for a crumbly one, more baking soda for fluffy scones, less for whoopie pies, more butter for brownies, less for banana bread. And do you know what, as long as you don't accidentally put in garlic powder instead of ginger, and you don't burn it, the sugar is ALWAYS going to make it taste good - no matter how chewy or crumbly it is.
I discovered a little about baclava while I was at the Al Samadi Bakery recently - the term "baclava" actually refers to the pastry, not the sweets. It's a super-soft mix that is flattenend, then has more layers of the same placed on top, and then is flattened again and again and again until you get a mille feuille style of multi-layered pastry. They then use this "baclava" to make sweets in hundreds of different ways.
There is another wonderful style of pastry that abounded in the factory, and that was knafe (or kanafe) - pastry made up of hundreds of threads that can be pulled apart and moulded any which-way. Like Baclava, the pastry has given the dish its name, and if you type kanafe into a search engine, you will get hundreds of recipes for the wonderful arabic cheese-filled desert pie.
And do you know the wonderful thing? We can buy both pastries in the freezer at the local supermarket (but baclava is better known as 'filo'). So here is how you make it the easy way:
For the last three years, we have escaped the Dubai heat and travelled to southern France. Languedoc, Dordogne, Cote d'Azur, Var, Vaucluse - we've seen them all. And there's one thing that binds them - something I can't seem to get anywhere else in the world.... Radishes. Not just any kind of radishes - the tiny sweet, peppery rosebud type aptly named "French Breakfast" radishes. I don't eat them for breakfast, but they do taste amazing with a baguette, a slab of butter and Camargue sea-salt flakes, with a chaser of Picpoul or Provincial Rosé.
The problem with French Breakfast radishes is that they expire very quickly, and so that's why you rarely see them out of a French Provincial market, so when I saw fresh, crisp ones at the local Hypermarket the other day, I nearly upturned the nearest veggie crate and started singing "La Marseillaise" with my hand over my heart. But what to do with them when the traditional 5 o'clock hors d'ouvres are off the menu? Salad. And I gave them a regional stamp.
I've tried to make mayonnaise several times in my life. Sometimes it works, and less times it doesn't. There's really no excuse for not making it, of course, because even when it doesn't work, the ways to fix it are easy (I love the way this lovely lady makes her mayo). Except, it's fairly easy to buy good mayonnaise in a jar. But is it good?
Jar mayonnaise is fine for sandwiches, and as an ingredient to mix into other dressings, but when the mayonnaise is the main ingredient in a sauce or dressing, it is obvious when it's store-bought. The other reason to make your own mayo is when you want to play with the consistency. For example, in a potato salad I like my mayonnaise loose and runny - if it's too thick, then when combining, it buffs up the edges of the potatoes, and besides, it's just far too stodgy.
So here's how the slap-dash cook makes potato salad:
When I was living in Melbourne, I used to get acupuncture once a fortnight after work. I would look forward to this day for thirteen days before it - not because I was going to get stuck with needles, sucked with cups and given a revolting tea decoction by Marina, but because Simon Johnson Fine Foods was underneath her parlour of mini-pain. After every session, I would buy a 560g jar of his Puttanesca sauce, and bring it home to make the easiest dinner ever - boil and drain pasta, add jar, chilli and one tin of drained tuna, stir and heat, and serve with stacks of piquant pecorino. And despite being the least difficult of all meals to prepare, it was always the household favourite, even when young Lion came along (minus the chilli).
With multi-hued farm-fresh capsicums as my inspiration, I set off to make one of my all-time comfort foods, ratatouille. Now, there are a million recipes out there for ratatouille, and probably 90% of them would offend the historically correct die-hard ratatouillans, but general consencus is that it has to be a tomato based dish with onions and garlic, herbes de Provence, and vegetables such as courgette and aubergine.
So you will all be shocked to find that my recipe below does not contain aubergine. It's not because I dislike aubergine, but because I find the recipe far easier to make, more flexible in its use, and more delicate in flavour without it. I also have a couple of illicit ingredients that I think make my ratatouille better than everyone elses (no false modesty around here).
The problem with living life as a hedonista is that you tend to get fat - all of that overindulgence eventually catches up with you. I have a friend who refuses to let that get him down - he laughs and pops another cholesterol pill with his saucisson, and says that life would be meaningless without good food. I however, also take pleasure from wearing beautiful clothes, and at the moment, all I fit into is tents from Carrefour.
So. Diet. But what diet for a hedonista? The Atken's Diet of course. Well, maybe an abridged one - I simply avoid all starches (rather than all carbohydrates including sugars) every second day, and amazingly, it works. When things get really bad, I have to go weeks on end without starch, but that has a particularly cranky side effect.
I love cooking for parties. It is the kind of food I really excel at - tit-bits that can combine my love of fusion food, and my desire to cheat at every corner. I make one hell of a Peking duck pancake, and my canapes (I reserve that title for anything on a biscuit or piece of Melba toast) are inventive and delicious. But (beside it not falling into the category of fusion food), this is my new favourite cheat. I served them at my husband's birthday party last week, and they disappeared before the steam ceased rising off them.
