December 2017

I’ve been meaning to try out Eman’s kabuli rice recipe for a while now, but that dish requires Saudi spice or baharat, which I didn’t have on hand nor can easily get at stores.  Finally got around to making it over the New Year’s Day long weekend.

I only toasted the spices for about 5 minutes, because I noticed my cumin seeds were getting really brown.  I wonder if it would be better if I toasted it for a full 10 minutes as suggested.  My spices were a bit lumpy after grinding, and I wonder if it was because I didn’t dry the grinder jar well enough, or if it was because there was still some moisture in the spices.  In any case, I stored this in my freezer to make sure it keeps longer.

Can’t wait to try out the kabuli rice.

It took me a while to finally make Eman’s Lamb Meghazlia, mainly because I needed to mix the meghazlia spice mix myself.  Since I have some lamb in the freezer I really needed to get rid of, I set aside some time today to make this spice mix.

What took me a while to figure out was the “besbasa Indian” listed in Eman’s ingredients list.  After some research I thought what she was asking for was bisbas, a spicy Yemeni spice mix, and that was what I used to make my current batch of meghazlia.  While sitting around researching this spice a bit more, I realized that besbasa was another name for mace.  So my meghazlia spice mix is most probably going to be quite different from Eman’s.  Sigh.  Anyway, I’ve noted down both my version and Eman’s version, for my future reference.

I made this spice mix thinking that this was the besbasa Eman was referring to for her meghazlia spice mix recipe.  It turned out that this actually wasn’t what she meant, but in any case I’ll try to figure out what other things I can use this for.

Based on the recipe by Sheba Yemeni Food.