Aroma Cucina

Algerian Style Lamb & Prune Couscous

Saturday night was Algerian Night in our house.  An unctuous lamb and prune tagine, lemon scented couscous, khobz flatbread flavored with wood smoke from the fireplace. I was dressed in my best Dorothy Lamour Goes Bedouin outfit, Jeff was suavely chic in his embroidered tunic.

Blame it on Foodbuzz. We won round 1 of the Food Blog competition and our next challenge was to make a classic ethnic dish.  In Umbria, eating Tuscan food is considering exotically ethnic. Fortunately, inspiration was playing in the street outside our house. Algerian! We have a few Algerian families living on our block and we’d already been treated to some of their couscous so the pieces fell into place.

Armed with that flavor memory and a recent conversation with one of the kids about how they make couscous, I was almost ready.  A Google search for recipes turned into an odyssey. This is a cuisine that comes straight from the Garden of Eden: lemons, oranges, vegetables, spices, nuts.  A crazy quilt of culinary influences: African, Berber, Arab, Moorish, Jewish, Turkish, Italian, even French. It all made me hungry. I wanted to jump on the first camel and join a Bedouin harem just so I could eat with them.

By now, It was getting late so we had to dash to the Halal butcher for lamb and spices and hopefully some advice. We discovered the only butcher we knew of had closed and the guy at the nearby kebab store had no idea where we could find a Halal butcher. He was floored we were even asking.  Italians would never ask, and we were Italian speaking ‘stranieri’ so he couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then we ran into our friend Carla, who thought she knew where to find a Halal butcher, so we set off at a sprint because it was nearly lunchtime and literally burst into the Moroccan butcher shop which brought all conversation in the store to a halt. What on earth were two very non-Muslim looking women doing in the Halal store?  Two Moroccan men slid to the back corner of the store and warily watched us.  It’s an uneasy, sometimes suspicious coexistence between the Muslims and the Italians. That’s a scenario that is playing out in more than one place, isn’t it?
Regardless, the shopkeeper was friendly, but clueless on the subject of couscous. His only explanation for the two different types of couscous was that one was yellow. I guess he’s the butcher, but his wife is the cook.
 With supplies in hand and kisses to Carla, we headed back home to get ready for Algerian NIght.

The first order of business was to build a fire so we could get a good bed of coals going and Jeff took care of that while I tried to follow Chef Zadi’s instructions for making his Aunt Farida's khobz flatbread.  It’s a simple dough of whole wheat flour, water, salt and olive oil that gets thoroughly kneaded then cooked in a screeching hot pan and finally reheated on the grill to soak up some of the wood smoke flavor.


I blended spices: cinnamon, allspice, paprika, black pepper, grains of paradise, chili, turmeric and tossed this fragrant mix with the lamb pieces.  Big chunks of carrot and lamb went onto the bottom layer, then onions, shallots, garlic and finally potatoes and prunes.  I had steeped some saffron in broth and that went into the pot. The lid went down and the tagine went into the fire place. 

The tagine bubbled, the Arab music lulled us into an exotic frame of mind. A pomegranate cocktail put us further in the mood...and voila` it was time to eat.

In a few minutes, the couscous was ready.  Fresh mint and cilantro,  sweet raisins and tangy lemon peel all made for a beautiful balance with the luxurious and rich lamb.
 
By this time, we were starving and it was worth the wait. The lamb had caramelized on the bottom, so there was crisp, crunchy lamb attached to meltingly tender lamb. Now that is nothing short of finger licking divine. The vegetables had absorbed all the spice flavors and were fork-mashing tender.

In short, we had an absurd amount of fun putting this remarkable meal together. I’ve now added North Africa to our long list of places to visit.  The whole experience of researching Algerian food reinforced one of my central beliefs: food could be the ultimate peacemaker if we gave it a chance.

Project Food Blog, Voting

I'm not good at this. I don't like it. It's not my style. I won't ask again. As part of the Foodbuzz blogging competition I'm supposed to ask you to vote for my post. Here's the link.

Just click the vote button once...or it takes your vote away. Geez...not very friendly!

Do it if you feel like it. Either way, I'll still love you and I'll keep blogging away.  

And to thank you for your putting up with my nonsense, here's a photo of THE MOTHER OF ALL FIG TREES.  That's a view from inside the tree. I don't know if you know fig trees, but this is one of the biggest ones I've ever seen.  Fig season is a good time of year!

Fresh figs with a nugget of gorgonzola stuffed inside, then a strip of pancetta wrapped around the fig and sizzled in the oven is just a fine, fine way to eat figs. :--)

 

What goes on in the kitchen?

"I raised to my lips a forkful of the grilled sardine . . . a shudder ran through my whole body and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place." - my apologies to Marcel Proust.

Alone, in Paris.  Maybe it was my first time in Paris, I can’t remember now, but I know I was alone and missing him, my dining companion. It was late into the lunch hour, there were only one or two other tables that still had diners and they were already puffing on their cigarettes, when the gruff, white haired waiter set the platter of grilled sardines in front of me. The gorgeous scent of charred fish skin perfumed the plate, the puddle of olive oil invited me to take the first bite. I didn’t know a sardine could taste like that. It tasted of the sea, but rich and oily reminding me of Sunday morning mackerel breakfasts I shared with my father. I thought I sighed out loud with pleasure, but my face must have betrayed my loneliness. The waiter returned, reached for the inside of my wrist and gently rubbed it, while asking, “Ca va?”.  “Was I OK?” The warmth of that intimate caress melted away my sadness and I laughed and said I was fine.  And I really was fine. I was tasting each bite, secretly remembering each flavor, stealing his recipe, so that when I went home I would be able to make it and share it.

It was one of those crystalline moments when an experience changes everything. Instead of being alone, I now had a mission: to bring those flavors home so that I could share them.  Maybe it began then. I can’t remember now, but I started carrying around a notebook and made notes of flavor combinations. I studied the way a chef would play with texture and color. I came up with outrageous ideas for experiments when I went home.  I was a sponge and a thief, lifting ideas like a knockoff artist at a fashion show.  

Of course, the trouble with a dinner in Paris is that it can only be had in Paris, and instead of copying a dish, I was riffing off what I had tasted, making the dish my own.  Years later, a chef instructor would tell me “You are the sum of what you have tasted.” He meant  I was building a tool box of cooking knowledge bit by bit.

While I was off having my food epiphany, somebody, maybe Al Gore, I don’t remember,  invented the internet. With one click we could tell the world everything we ate for dinner!  It was a time of great liberation and once the Great God Google was in our midst, we could ask the most esoteric question about the flowering cycle of saffron.  And lo! Someone would know the answer. Creative, generous, curious people were sharing their culinary knowledge in forums and on blogs and a global community of the food obsessed evolved. 

The reason I have such a bad memory is that I spend a lot of time in the kitchen feeding people.  So I tend to forget things like dates and who invented the internet. A kitchen full of people is my idea of heaven.
   Jeff and I are the luckiest people in the world because whether we are in Italy, NYC or Snowbird Utah, we have a “family” of friends to share our table.  Some people are good at chopping, dicing and splicing, some people are good at telling stories while the rest of us are cooking, and thank god, some people are good at clean up. Everyone is welcome as long as you aren’t boring. If you are boring...you can’t come back.

This blog is an extension of what goes on in our kitchen. It’s a place to hang out, share recipes, photos, food politics, culinary history.  It’s lively, sometimes loud and opinionated, but we always have a good time.  If we are lucky, Jeff will be pouring us a cocktail to get the party started.  So, if you are new to Aroma Cucina: Bienvenuti! Welcome!
If you are a regular, no, I didn’t lose my mind and have a sudden need to tell our secrets to the world.  This post is part of the Foodbuzz Project Food Blog and we have some new people in the kitchen, so behave, ok?