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September 2017

Viewing posts from September , 2017

Weekend Cooking: Saleeg

I’ve been looking through the Saudi Food Eman YouTube channel, and seriously this lady is pretty talented.  I’ve tried a few of her recipes already, and have quite a long list of others in my weekend cooking queue.  This particular dish, saleeg, was something different from the recent rice dishes I’ve been making.

Looking at how simple the ingredients were, I had my doubts about whether this was really as good as I imagined it to be, but in the end my fears were unfounded.  This tasty rice porrige worked so perfectly with the no-frills roast chicken, and yes, I think I agree with Eman that this dish may satisfy the pickiest eaters.  Try it out!

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Weekend Cooking: Lamb Haneeth with Rice

During a rare trip to Berkat Madinah, a Middle Eastern grocer, I bought a jar of Chef Ammar’s haneeth spice.  We love the haneeth served at Half Moon, our favorite Arab restaurant, so I figured I’d try making it on my own.  However recipes I found online were very different from what I thought haneeth looks like, because most are roasted in the oven, instead of being nicely baked in aluminium foil pouches.

The jar of spices has been sitting in the larder for a while now, so when I had the family over for dinner recently I made lamb and chicken haneeth.  The chicken turned out really well, however I really had to experiment with the lamb recipe, because most require hours of roasting in the oven and I really couldn’t be bothered with that.  I expect to keep improving on this recipe, but for my first try I cooked the meat in the pressure cooker first, before transferring to the oven.  Flavor wise I think it was good, but I think the rice could be better.  Will keep tweaking this until I get it right.

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Weekend Cooking: Chef Ammar’s Haneeth Roasted Chicken with Cajun Spiced Vegetables

We got Monday off to celebrate our victory at the SEA Games, so Rudy and I decided to have the family over for dinner.  The fridge was overflowing with chicken and lamb and all sorts of stuff, so I joined the effort to clean it out.  I needed to feed about 9 adults, so I decided on both chicken and lamb haneeth.

This recipe was based on Chef Ammar’s recipe, from one of the episodes of his show.  The directions as shown on the video looked a bit strange, so I’ve modified it to what I think it should be, based on my experience roasting chicken.

Overall this dish turned out really well.  I loved the flavor of the vegetables, they roasted nicely and were perfectly tender.  I used a pretty small chicken this time, and it was done after only 30 minutes in the oven.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, butterflying and cooking at high temperature is the fastest, almost fool-proof way to get juicy, perfectly roasted chicken.  Will definitely make this again!

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