Meal 126: Oman

Out of the 193 UN members, Oman's the only one that begins with O. It sort of stands alone geopolitically, too. It's a lot lower-key than its Middle East neighbors, with neither the flashiness of other sultanates, nor the strife of some neighbors. On the other hand, Oman has a rich history given its strategic position at the mouth of the Persian Gulf: its traders plied the Indian Ocean for centuries, and it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that it finally relinquished its claim to Zanzibar off the Tanzanian coast. In fact, limon omani, the dried lime with a hauntingly earthy tang, was the creation of Omani traders preserving fruit they bought in Malaysia on the decks of their ships. It was Laura's birthday weekend, so for the third year in a row we had the meal on the Oregon coast with friends.

Recipes from Oman are shockingly hard to find online. Everything I cooked came from the book Food of Oman. I link to websites that have adapted versions of the recipes from this book where I can find them.

Chips Oman

Chips Oman is a commercial product with a strong devotion, apparently popular as a flavor and crunch factor in sandwiches as well as a snack. It's potato chips covered in a spice blend which features that limon omani as well as chili, salt, and a few supporting actors. I forgot to bring potato chips to the coast, so instead we had them on Juanita's tortilla chips, which was pretty darn good.

Mchicha Wa Nazi | Coconut creamed spinach | Recipe

This dish tastes like it's straight from East Africa, with little to no mainland-Omani reinterpretation. Yet it's a good thing: the mild flavor and creaminess makes for a good contrast with the bold flavors of the rest of the meal.

Marak dal | Spiced red lentils | Recipe

I originally decided to make this as a consolation to the vegetarians, but everyone agreed that this was a winner, with the flavors of this dish far richer and more complex than expected from a big lump of lentils. I think the process of cooking lentils separately from the onions and potatoes, and then combining them, leads to more distinct textures and flavors. Of course, all those spices sure help too.

Zanzibari biryani

Biryani, a richly spiced rice-and-meat dish that probably originated in India, one of my favorite dishes to eat, and one of the most challenging to make. Everything's cooked separately, and then somehow at the end you're supposed to assemble it so the rice stays perfectly fluffy while intermingled with the sauces and chunks of meats and the rest.

In this case, the cooking is even more complicated than I'd experienced before: the chicken is boiled and then pan-fried before being mixed into the richly spiced sauce, while the rice goes through an extra scenting with saffron-infused rosewater. But somehow the assembly came together, and all those spices — the clove that makes it Zanzibari, plus with cardamom and much more — along with the fresh lime and cilantro and crispy onions, made this by far the best biryani I've made, and one of the best I've ever tasted. If you are eager to make a biryani, and can get your hands on the cookbook, by all means do.

Sticky date pudding

Sticky toffee pudding is a British treat made with dates and covered in a sinful sauce of brown sugar and butter. It only stands to reason that a place that grows dates would make its own variant. This one was a little more cake-like, as you can see it was baked as a solid cake and then doused in sauce. Certainly not a classic birthday cake, but really tasty and incredibly moist.

Meal 125: Niger

Niger is Nigeria's much lesser known northern neighbor. To reduce the inevitable confusion, its English pronunciation imitates the French: nee-ZHEHR, and the demonym is Nigerien, with only that second E providing the needed distinction. It's a Sahel nation, meaning it's in the transition zone between the Sahara and the tropical West African coast. Mercy Corps, our fundraising beneficiary, does a lot of work in Niger, including both emergency food relief and helping farmers improve their long-term resilience. Joining us for the meal were Kal, Douglas, Annette, Eric, Robin, Cara and friends. We were also honored to welcome Issa, a recent refugee from Chad, which has a somewhat similar cuisine, so he very kindly pointed out which dishes worked and didn't.

Sugar peanuts | Recipe (scroll down)

Pour peanuts into a pan, stir in a bunch of sugar and some water, and bake until the water evaporates and you're left with caramelized peanuts. What an easy snack to make! It's a great start to a meal.

Masa | Yeasted rice pancakes | Recipe

I can't imagine how tedious it would be to make this dish without an electric blender to grind soaked raw rice into a batter, but I tip my hat in salute to the (most likely) women who've been doing it a long time, because the result is really tasty and satisfying. The yeast gives a little tang and volume, and the rice is thick enough that once the outside of the pancake gets crisp from the griddle, the inside is still soft, so it's got a lot of texture and flavor going on. Issa said it reminded him a whole lot of the ones he ate growing up!

Greens with handmade couscous

I can't find the recipe I used to make this, but I wouldn't recommend it anyway. While it instructive to make couscous from scratch from millet flour, it took a long time and a lot of work and the result was hardly distinguishable from a decent pre-made couscous. Enough people talk about the wonder of fresh-made couscous that I have to figure it was some failure on my part. And anyway, once mixed with the greens, it was just kinda dry and disappointing. As Issa said, "I'm not really sure what you were trying to do here."

Mo & dungiri | Rice and black-eyed peas | Recipe

This dish is a great way to fill up, and on its own it's not terribly flavorful. The real star of the show is the peanut-bouillon spice powder in the recipe, which frankly went great on everything in the meal.

Tukasu | Lamb in date sauce | Recipe

I cooked just about the same dish for Mali, but it was so good I couldn't help doing it again. I love lamb, I love dates, and I love spices, and it turns out the three of them together with some vegetables to make a rich sauce is a super winner. The only major change from last time is that I left out the steamed bread balls, because there was quite enough starch from the rest of the meal.

Fruit salad

Used what tropical fruits were good at the market: pineapple, blood orange, and mango.

Meal 124: Nigeria

For our first ever Nosh in LA, a very Portland thing happened: it started raining while we were barbecuing. It wasn't too hard, and it actually made standing near the glowing coals really pleasant. And who knows, maybe that extra bit of moisture helped the beef suya skewers turn out as well as they did. Nigeria is by far Africa's most populous country, ranked #7 in the world at 192 million — with a median age of eighteen and the highest growth rate of the top 15 countries. There's enormous diversity of language, culture and religion, and accordingly there's a lot of variety in the food, though fortunately for the sake of Noshing, there are themes that run throughout most if not all of the food traditions, as well as foods associated with a particular ethnic group that are popular all over.

Huge thanks to Kirsten and Alex for not only hosting, but also helping so much with the cooking. Joining us were Sarah-Doe, Zoe, Jess, Jessie, and our guest of honor Ben, who taught us a lot about the foods he grew up eating with his Nigerian family.

Egusi pepper soup | Melon-seed spicy stew | Recipe

Soup is the core unit of most Nigerian meals. The term is applied more broadly than I'm used to; from what I can gather — and please, if you're more familiar with the cuisine, correct me if I'm wrong — any sort of food that's been cooked in liquid until soft will qualify.

The two soups I kept coming across were pepper soup and egusi soup. The former isn't a reference to chilis, but rather various spices named for a passing similarity to black pepper. The latter is a melon seed that's ground up and lends thickness, texture, and flavor. Having the time and kitchen space to make only one, I was glad to find that there's at least one group, the Urhobos, who combine them.

If you don't have a West African market near you there's no sense in trying to make it, as you almost certainly won't find the core ingredients elsewhere. If you do, well, maybe try finding another recipe. Despite the several steps and promising ingredients, the soup ended up as a confused and underwhelming jumble, both visually and flavor-wise. Or maybe I just messed it up. Either way, maybe better to stick with one soup or the other.

Garri | Cassava balls

Frequent readers of the blog, all five or so of you, will know that I've struggled with African porridge/mush, and so often ended up with something lumpy and runny. Well, this time I think I nailed it, with something thick enough to roll into balls. I think it's something about how the prepared cassava flour doesn't require any cooking, so you can keep adding either water or flour as needed until the consistency is right.

In Nigeria, a mass of starch like this is called a "swallow." You pinch a piece of it, form it into a scoop, pick up some of the soup or other thing you're eating, and swallow it all.

Suya | Spicy beef kebabs | Recipe

Lots of cultures grill meat on skewers, and some of them season the meat with a dry spice rub. But I've never seen ground peanuts mixed into the spices, the way the Hausas do it. This addition was awesome, adding just a bit of crunchy texture and just barely toning down a moderately fiery rub. A keeper!

Ewa | Honey beans in sauce | Recipe

This dish resembles the more straightforward ingredients and technique that I've encountered in many other African countries' meals. What's notable is the beans, a relative of the black-eyed pea that has a less prominent "eye," is more brown, and has a mildly sweet flavor, hence "honey beans." It was fine, maybe even good if you particularly like the flavor of palm oil.

Boli | Roasted plantains | Recipe

Many Nigerian sweets are fried, but making them would have violated my "no deep frying in other people's kitchens" rule. And fortunately, the market had packages of chin-chin, little semi-sweet fried nuggets. But we had to do something more, and the grill was already hot, so we made the simple yet very satisfying treat of sweet plantains cooked with nothing more than charcoal. There's something exotic about grill marks on fruit, and the end-of-the-coals low heat made for some very nice caramelization. While grilled plantains are most often eaten alongside fish and sauce, in this case they made for a very nice gently sweet finish to the meal.

Meal 122: New Zealand

A little over two years ago, when our now-good-friend Deena did an NPR piece about United Noshes, someone in New Zealand noticed and I did a phone interview on Radio NZ. I promised that when we got to their country, I'd get back in touch. And I did! We did a fun bit where they had listeners send in advice through social media of what to cook, which we chatted through live on the radio. So what do Kiwis eat? Well, lamb, of course, since that's what they raise a ton of for wool and meat alike. Otherwise it's in large part based on traditional English foods like sweet and savory pastries, with a growing influence of fresher Mediterranean flavors, blended with some indigenous influences like sweet potato.

Joining us on a cold winter's night for a taste of the other hemisphere were Estel, Sarah, Laura, Patrick, Kal, Julie, Levi, Martha, Karen, and Red. (Oh, and Reba!)

Kiwi dip

While we Americans love our convenience, one thing we really haven't gotten into is canned milk products, so we suffer the inconvenience of a perishable product as the base for our otherwise dead-simple French onion dip (recipe: mix one packet of onion mix into sour cream; serve). Well, Kiwis have no such aversion, and their reward is no temporal constraint on their ability to whip up the equivalent dip, using a can of what they call reduced cream and what we can find in the States in Hispanic markets or supermarket aisles as media crema. They even gussy it up a bit with a dash of malt vinegar, but since any self-respecting NZer would have that on hand anyway, the extra effort is still less.

It's really tasty. Eat with thick or wavy potato chips, or veggies if you want to pretend you're being at least a little healthy.

Along with the dip, we had ray oysters on the halfshell. They were in homage to, but certainly no replica of, Bluff oysters, a particular species that's found at the southern tip of the South Island. Equally fatty, but much classier.

Mince and cheese pie | Recipe

One Radio NZ listener wrote in that the national dish is really a "$2 mince and cheese pie from the dairy," which in American English means "$1.40 ground beef and cheese hot pocket from the convenience store." So I made one! The all-butter puff pastry crust probably made this a bit fancier than the grab-n-go version, and of course as a whole pie the crust-to-filling ratio was surely off, but otherwise I think this turned out to be a fairly accurate and tasty replica. Speaking of, "tasty cheese" is apparently what Aussies and Kiwis call what we'd think of as sharp cheddar cheese, to the extent that you can refer to "tasty and crackers" and people will apparently know what you mean.

Watties sauce | Recipes

It seems that Watties is to NZ what Heinz is to the US, the universal tomato condiment. Watties is apparently a little runnier, a little sweeter, and a little more spiced — it's known as tomato sauce, not ketchup. Not finding any here, I made my own, with frozen pureed tomatoes from last year's harvest. The recipe I followed had a shocking amount of allspice, so I cut back quite a bit and even then it was pretty strong. It was pretty good, but unless you have a strong reason to recreate the flavor of the original (like, if you have an around-the-world cooking project or are really trying to impress a Kiwi), you may as well just make do with ketchup.

Lamb with mint sauce | Recipe for mint sauce

There's about seven sheep for every New Zealander — and that's down from twenty a few decades ago! — and accordingly, those Radio NZ listeners made very clear that lamb was required on our table. It seems that the classic version, fit for a feast, is a roast leg, whether in a classic austere British style, or enlivened by garlic and herbs; the latter's what I chose to do. I got a whole leg (bone in, including the shank), studded it with garlic and rosemary, and let it cook for hours. I also whipped up some mint sauce with a splash of malt vinegar, two ingredients that contrast nicely.

The lamb was good, but not great, kind of a disappointment given the quality and expense of the meat. I mean, we all enjoyed it, but I was hoping it'd be something more.

Minty peas | Recipe

Mint again! Green peas, green onions, and mint made for a vibrant hint of sunnier days. Easy to throw together, tasty, and decently healthy.

Kaanga waru | Steamed sweet potato and corn pudding |Recipe

To properly represent the cuisine of the Māori, the indigenous Polynesians who predated the British, I ought to have done a hangi. But that would have required digging a pit in the yard, superheating rocks in an adjacent fire, quickly moving said rocks into the pit, lowering in sackcloth-enrobed bunch of meat plus veggies, and covering the whole thing with soil for several hours. Even if I had all the space and time, it seems that watching a few YouTube videos isn't enough, that without having learned from others you risk making a muddy, undercooked mess of it all. Time for plan B.

Several listeners suggested that our meal include kumara, which as the sound of the name suggests is also a Māori food; Americans know it as sweet potato. While kumara is quite common around NZ, this dish is Māori through and through, though the cooking technique and most of the ingredients come from the British! It's a dense loaf of shredded kumara, cornmeal, flour, sugar, milk and butter, steamed in a cheesecloth. It's dense, and it's really pretty tasty.

Pavlova | Baked meringue with fruit | Recipe

Aussies and Kiwis may argue about who owns the "pav," but history is on New Zealand's side; while it grew very popular in Australia, it first took form in Wellington during the tour of the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who was described as dancing as if she were lighter than air.

A pav is a marvel of kitchen chemistry, starting with the goop of some egg whites and ending with a magical, etherial mass that's crisp on the outside and chewy like a marshmallow on the inside, all thanks to a ton of beating and strategic addition of sugar, cornstarch, and an acid. Once the science is over, the art begins: the pavlova is a blank canvas for decoration with fruit to your heart's and eye's desire. Of course, ours had kiwifruit!

Meal 120: Nauru

If you've heard of Nauru, it's likely because of the refugee detention center that Australia operates there. It's just about the only thing going on economically there, since the decline of the phosphate mines that briefly made the country the richest in the world per capita in the 70s. It's a strange and sad story, in which a small population decides to turn over most of the island to mining bat guano, making everyone on the island instantly wealthy with no reason to work, but the whole artifice crashes within a few decades as the phosphate dries up and the sovereign fund is woefully mismanaged. If you can believe it, one of the things that brought them down was an investment in an unsuccessful musical in London about Leonardo. While Leonardo did a whole lot of just about everything, now just about nothing (save for the detention center) happens on the island. Virtually all of the workable land was destroyed through mining, and the population gets by on foreign aid and leveraging its UN membership to trade diplomatic recognition for cash. (It's proven adept at playing Taiwan and the People's Republic of China against each other.) Anyway, the present reality of no farming, combined with the recent history of a taste for imported goods, means that the island's diet is limited and, frankly, unhealthy, as manifested in Nauru's inglorious status as the world's most overweight country.

Given how small the country is (just about 10,000 people), and how it pretty much has no cuisine of its own nor a tourism industry that might at least make a few local menus show up on a website, this was a really darn hard one to research. I ended up spending a lot of time scrolling through the "Nauru Wanna Buy/Sell" Facebook list and reading several depressing articles about poor nutrition. I have no idea how well I did with replicating what you might expect to eat in Nauru, but I sure did give it a shot.

Bringing a sense of obscure adventure to the table were Jon, Nicole, Annie, Will, Amie, Vincent, and his guest.

Coconut fish | Recipe

Despite the doom and gloom in the intro, it's not like all of the island's food traditions have disappeared. There are still coconut trees, and the seas still have fish in them, so like many of its far-flung neighbors, Nauru also serves tuna in coconut milk. Either you like it or you don't — the author of the recipe is definitely in the latter category. I found it a fairly unexciting way to treat raw tuna, but hey, I like raw tuna so I still liked it. If you're making this, if at all possible don't use canned coconut milk, as it'll taste tinny. Instead, find a coconut, shred it, squeeze it with a bit of warm water and use that milk. Or, be semi-lazy like me: buy shredded coconut from the freezer section of an Asian grocery, and squeeze that with warm water.

Spam fried rice | Recipe

I have to admit, I'd been looking forward to cooking this for a good long while. I've been told many a time that canned meat is a popular thing throughout the Pacific islands, a taste acquired from the rations provided by Americans during and after WWII, and of that, Spam is king. We even had canned corned beef in a Fijian dish, but it wasn't until this, our 120th meal, that we finally got our taste of Hormel's finest.

And I have to admit, with a grin both sheepish and impish, that it was super tasty. Fried rice is a pretty undeniably tasty thing, and the addition of crispy cubes of unnaturally spongy meat squares just made it all the better.

Lemon chicken | Recipe

Several sources say that most of the food establishments in Nauru cook Chinese food, and this one site says he had some good lemon chicken there once. Given how little detailed info there is online about the specific foods that they eat on the daily there, that was enough for me to go on. I have no idea how close to authentic this recipe was, but it was just as awesome as you would expect breaded and fried chunks of chicken in a thick and tangy sauce to be. Yum!

Pandanus tea | Recipe

I have no idea if they actually drink this in Nauru, but this recipe on a random site claims they do (see the pattern?), so I made it. As I've described in a few other Pacific meals' writeups, pandan leaf has the same nutty scent as basmati rice.

I had no clue of what to make for dessert, so given the indications of cheap-and-cheerful western foods, I went for mid-low-grade vanilla ice cream.