Meal 128: Pakistan

Pakistan was, until 1947, part of India. While the intention was to create a new country for Muslims, the dividing line was in many ways arbitrary, ill-informed, or simply doomed, given that religious communities intermixed plenty. In particular, the huge state of Punjab was split in two. Then, millions of people moved across the lines in both directions (or died in the attempt) to the country that reflected their religion. Both of these factors explain why Pakistani food seems so similar to the North Indian food we know: they were once the same country — in fact, much of the Indian food in the US is Punjabi style — and many immigrants brought foods from other parts of what's now the Republic of India.

This meal fell during Ramadan, which posed both an opportunity and a challenge. I was excited to have a guiding principle, since the food after the fast is often ritualized. But the challenge was the risk of offense by indulging in all the post-fast treats without observing the fast itself. Several Muslims assured me not to worry, and in fact a Pakistani member of the US Embassy's staff in Islamabad graciously gave me plenty of advice on what to prepare. (Thank you Erin for the connection!) In addition to the below recipes, we began the meal with the traditional fast-breaking food: dates.

Our guest of honor was Kal, a previous Nosher, who was born in Afghanistan but spent a decade as a refugee in Pakistan before coming to the US. We also had Katherine, Carlo, Marsha, Robert, Chie, Lyall, Eileen, and friends.

Rooh Afza | Sweet drink

This is the fast-breaking drink of Pakistan. It's a commercial syrup that's mixed with water — what's known in British English as a squash — and much improved with lime. (Some mix it with milk.) It's was a completely unfamiliar flavor sensation, a blend of all sorts of fruits, herbs, and spices with the most recognizable note being rose. It wasn't really my thing but I can see this sugary drink being extremely quenching after a hot day with nothing touching your lips after sunrise.

Fruit chaat | Spiced fruit salad | Recipe

Some cultures have figured out that bold spices are a fantastic complement for fruit. A shake of Tajín, a Mexican blend of chili, dried lime juice and salt, perks up mango, pineapple, and just about any other fruit or raw vegetable. In Morocco, they often serve orange slices with cinnamon. And now we here have Pakistan's contribution to the genre. The blend is more complex than the others I've seen before, with elements of sour, salty, pungent, and minerally. It would certainly perk up less-than-perfect fruit, but when it's really good and in season like here, it's pretty tasty and addictive and a failsafe appetite stimulant. 

Dahi bhallay | Black gram fritters in yogurt sauce | Recipe

From a Western perspective, what's curious about this dish is how the fritters are soaked in water after frying. Why let all that great crisp go? So they can absorb the yogurt and tamarind dressing that makes them oh so tasty. This dish is quite a bit of effort with the frying, so it's not the sort of thing I'd just go about making on a weeknight, but it was a flavorsome treat.

Sai bhaji | Spinach and legume stew | Recipe

This straightforward curry is a staple of Sindh, the province of southeastern Pakistan. It's pretty straightforward to make, a stew of greens, tomatoes, a mild amount of spice, and lentils or split chickpeas. Unfortunately, I felt like what came out was kind of what went in: it was perfectly edible, but just not terribly exciting, and it's unclear to me if I did something wrong or it's simply meant to be that way. There's no doubt, however, that this is one of the most nutritious dishes I have cooked for a Nosh!

Karahi gosht | Goat simmered in tomato sauce | Recipe

This recipe calls for mutton, and in the Subcontinent, mutton means goat. (Not the meat of mature sheep, as in the UK.) I like goat, and good goat can be hard to find, so I ended up buying an entire goat from a small-scale butcher. I used two legs for this meal; the rest is in the chest freezer.

Now, to the dish. This one was a winner! A really straightforward, low effort technique — simmer the meat until it's cooked, then put in sauce stuff and let it cook until tasty. You don't even have to toast spices or do any other tedious prep, just dump and simmer. Even though it ended up more liquidy than pasty like it should have (was my yogurt too runny, or tomatoes too watery?), the flavors were excellent and bright and I oughtta make this one again.

Mutton nihari | Goat stew | Recipe

I couldn't decide which goat dish to cook, so I made both. If you're only cooking one, choose the other. The nihari was totally fine, but despite all the spices, turned out sorta plain, which was a disappointment after cooking for half a day. As with the saibhaji, I'm not sure if there was an error along the way, or that's just how it's meant to be.

Chicken sajji | Slow-roasted chicken with spiced rice | Recipe

This recipe represents Balochistan, a mostly arid province bordering Afghanistan and Iran. This dish is a whole lot more like what I know of Gulf cuisine, with the animal roasted rather than cooked in a sauce. What's more, the rice is parboiled, which is a technique I associate with Persian food. (A stickler will note that rice in biryani, a pinnacle of Indian cuisine, is similarly boiled hard until nearly done. I will rejoinder that, in fact. biryani is of Persian origin.) Anyway, I loved this. Cardamom, vinegar, dried pomegranate, and even dates all feature, and make for one scrumptious whole.

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 119: Nepal

The core of Nepalese food can be summed up in one very simply named dish: daal bhat, meaning "legumes [and] rice." Along with tarkari — a spiced dish we'd probably call a curry — and achar (pickles), this is the dish that many people in Nepal eat pretty much every single day. Fortunately, there's variety to be found in the type and preparation of the dal and the tarkari, and a wide variety of achars can bring all sorts of flavors. Characteristically, I tried to capture as much of that variety as possible with two daals, three tarkaris, and four achars! Now, Nepal is a geographically and ethnically diverse country, ranging from river plains to the highest mountain in the world, and with a whole wide variety of distinct cultures (Nepali is the home language of less than half of the population.). Accordingly, there are indeed other kinds of foods eaten, such as a variety of grilled meats, and perhaps most famously dumplings.

We took advantage of fine weather for a late-September outdoor meal. It was convenient that we could use the new outdoor wok burner, because we needed all the cooking devices we could get to cook so many dishes. Apologies in advance about the photos, our good camera was being repaired so we had to rely on an iPhone in far less than ideal lighting conditions!

Momo | Dumplings | Recipes: chicken momo, sauce

Pretty similar to dumplings you see in many Asian countries, though rather than the half-moon shape typical of potstickers, they're made into round purses and also tend to have more filling per piece. There are at least as many filling recipes as there are people who make momo, ranging across just about every type of meat and vegetable you can find in the area; we chose to go with a chicken version to accommodate dietary preferences. Frankly, vegetables made up the bulk of the filling anyway, and I'm glad we had a milder meat so the flavor of the curry and the electric zing of the Szechuan peppercorn could come through.

Daal | Legume stew | Recipes: black gram, pigeon peas

Daal is a whole lot more than that kinda soupy yellow thing you push to the side in favor of the tastier stuff at the Indian restaurant. (Well, at least that's what I tend to do with it.) There's a whole lot of lentils, peas, and beans that can be gently simmered — more often than not they're split, so the cooking time is reduced —and flavored into a protein-packed stew that's just begging to be paired with rice. Amidst a whole lot of options, I chose the pigeon-pea version, rahar ko daal, because it's apparently the "king of daals" in Nepal, and maas ko daal made with what's known as black gram because it looked pretty and seemed to offer a richer flavor.

I was a bit surprised to find that I preferred the more pedestrian-seeming pigeon-pea one, which had a brighter flavor with warm spice from the cinnamon and cumin. The dark one was fine too, but I felt like it was a bit too heavy, perhaps if it had a personality I'd call it "brooding." (To be fair, I didn't have the jimbu herb the recipe called for, but since it's in the same family as onion I don't think my concern would have been addressed).

Tarkari | Vegetable curry | Recipes: mustard green, bottle gourd

Nepali vegetable curries aren't quite as richly spiced as many Indian ones, rather the flavors of the individual spices seem to me to come through more: the maple-like nuttiness of fenugreek, the sharp whiff of mustard oil, the zing of the Szechuan peppercorn. It's a nice contrast with the more harmonious flavors of the daal, and crisp or firm vegetables like the bottle gourd also make for a flavor contrast.

Achar | Pickles |ginger, onion, tomato, gundruk

I shoulda thought to start the achars earlier. I knew that some of them take a good long while to get all good and funky, yet I really didn't get to it until a few days before. Fortunately, there was plenty I still could do, and jars from the store took care of the rest.

The ginger achar was not only the tastiest and most versatile, but the recipe ends with perhaps one of the best declarations I've read in a recipe: "This is the best thing to eat during lazy hours." The gundruk was really intense and funky, I only made it because I shockingly found a container of this salty, fermented, dried vegetable at the store, and whoo-boy, that's a bold one. Tomato achar is a really nice one that's found throughout the Subcontinent but surprisingly hasn't made its way onto restaurant tables like mint and coriander chutneys. I think the condiment, which is like a chunkier, more spiced, less sweet version of ketchup, would go over well.

Kaju barfi | Cashew fudge | Recipe

A lovely, gentle way to end an intense meal after all those spices and textures. A just-barely-holding-together fudge of ground cashews with a judicious dosing of cardamom.

Meal 117: Myanmar

Burmese food is intense. Funky, fiery, crunchy, soupy, tangy, herby…a full meal is a real workout for your palate. It bears some resemblance to Thai food, but with more crispy bits, more turmeric, and a lot more fermentation.

It’s also a good amount of work to prepare! A birthday gift of an outdoor street-vendor-style wok was extremely well timed, as there were several smelly, splattery things to be fried up. I’m never going to claim my cooking is authentic, but as I squatted next to the wok in the driveway in the mid-afternoon mid-summer heat, I felt like my approach was a bit closer to the on-the-ground reality than my normal induction-range cooking.

I’m also super lucky that there is a Burmese market in town. I’ve sung the praises of the highly global selection at Mingala before, but man, they really came through with every last ingredient I was looking for! I was the most grateful to find the fermented tea leaves, so I wouldn’t have to ferment them myself from scratch. (Though maybe I should have, as you'll see.)

(To address the Burma/Myanmar confusion: according to the BBC, they're essentially the common and literary version of saying the same word: "B" and "M" are both voiced consonants made with closed lips, for instance. The former is both the British colonial name as well as the democracy movement's preferred name, while the latter was instituted by the military junta and codified via its UN membership.)

It was a loverly summer evening so we enjoyed it outside with Pat, Debbie, Jeff, Denise, Chelsea, Al, Pan, Quinn, Lisa, Trish, Douglas, Kristen and friends.

Mohinga | Breakfast fish noodle soup | Recipe

The phrase “breakfast of champions” is overused, but a bowl of this rich, intense stuff is a pretty powerful way to get a day going — I certainly wouldn’t have conceived of it as a breakfast food were I not told it was. Yet this was a dinner, not a breakfast, but I cooked it anyway because pretty much everyone says it's the national dish.

You make a base from simmered catfish, aromatics like ginger and lemongrass, and shrimp paste, and then when it’s time for soup you simmer some of that paste with fish stock and then throw in some noodles. (I left out banana stem because I couldn't find any, and frankly I've never knowingly had it so I'm not sure what if anything we missed.) But arguably the best part is the crispy topping and tangy lime on top — I made beans and shallots, but there's a whole sub-cuisine just of of toppings you could do!

There's no question that there's a number of ingredients and several steps involved in making these soupy noodles. But if you're inspired and have the time, it's a great blend of flavors and textures.

Ohn-No Khao Swè | Coconut chicken noodle soup | Recipe

A different sort of noodle soup, more similar to Thai, with egg noodles and a coconut-curry base. (Though some Burmese might say that it's the Thai who got this dish from them and renamed it "khao soi"!)

Yes, I made two noodle soups. But they're so different! And I'm so glad I didn't let the first one get in the way of making this second one. It's a totally different type, with toothsome egg-wheat rather than soft rice noodles, and a rich, creamy, and subtler flavor rather than the much more punch-in-the-face mohinga. You could definitely make this with ingredients available at any Western supermarket: if you can't find gram flour just use a bit of wheat flour (preferably pan-toasted), and if you can't even find Asian egg noodles, any egg noodle (even the dry kind) would make for a decent substitute. In any event, I hope I remember this next time I'm jonesing for a chicken noodle soup with a twist, because it's pretty easy to make yet so satisfying to eat.

Pork curry | Recipe

Even after nearly 120 meals, I'm still finding novel cooking techniques. In this case, it's to separate the juice and the solids of the aromatics (onion, garlic, ginger) by blending and straining, using the liquid for simmering the meat, while separately frying the solids. For a curry, this has few seasonings — really, the only spices are turmeric and chili — and also requires quite a bit of attention to avoid browning the solids. I've never met a dish made with pork shoulder I didn't like, and this one was for sure tasty with that caramel-y depth from solid-sauteeing, though it didn't bring quite enough punch to make me want to make it again.

Lahpet thoke | Tea leaf salad | Recipe

If you’ve had the tea leaf salad at a place like Burma Superstar in San Francisco, with intriguingly tangy strands mixed in with cabbage and crunchy beans, apparently you were served the Westerner-friendly version. From what I’m led to understand, a true tea leaf salad in Myanmar is deconstructed, with a little pile of spicy, fermented tea leaves in the middle and surrounded by all sorts of other things to mix in.

Maybe I’ll stick to the Westernized version. The pre-prepared tea leaves were insanely intense: sour, spicy, and ferment-y in equal proportions. They were also were like spinach in how they make the back of your teeth feel. Really, it was more like an intense condiment than a salad. If anyone’s feeling adventurous, I’ve got one extra packet of these leaves that we didn’t end up opening… Though we didn't save you any of the crunchy fried-bean mix, that stuff was MSG-licious and went a long way in overcoming that intense tea-leaf flavor.

Many thanks to Emily for the advice on what to cook and buy!

Meal 112: Monaco

Another beachside birthday party, another meal from a tiny, rich European country! The principality of Monaco is a Central Park–sized nugget on the French Riviera, whose Italian-sounding name is a giveaway of a linguistic, cultural, and culinary heritage that’s more closely connected to northern Italy than southern France.

For such a small place, there’s a surprisingly thorough culinary heritage, which is far better documented online than those of countries several orders of magnitude larger. Of course, it’s squarely within the Mediterranean flavor realm, though with its own twist.

Barbagiuan | Chard turnovers | Recipe

Nobody knows why these are called “Uncle John” in the Monégasque language, but these tasty, stuffed-dough, fried nuggets are the national dish. They’re stuffed with chard, which almost makes you think they’re healthy. Quite tasty, a great accompaniment to sparkling wine or rosé. Thanks to Ellen for prepping and folding the dough!

Oignons monégasques | Stewed baby onions | Recipe

This one was the crowd favorite. Small onions — you should probably use pearl onions but all I could find were little cipollini, which seemed to work too — are first sautéed, then gussied up with tomato paste, vinegar, and, intriguingly, raisins. A delicious sweet-and-sour appetizer.

Socca | Chickpea flatbread | Recipe

I’m figuring it’s a North African influence that brought chickpea flour to this corner of the world. With it,street vendors in the area whip up a sort of crêpe that’s eaten as a snack. Frankly, I found it pretty bland and thin, and I clearly did something wrong because I then had it at a restaurant and it was thicker and fluffier and a whole lot better. Also, I left the big heavy round skillet I used to bake them at the rental house, so it was frankly a doubly disappointing dish. (Maybe choose a different recipe to avoid my fate, but even that won't help you keep track of your cookware.)

Fougasse | Focaccia bread | Recipe

The fougasse for which Monaco is known is actually a dessert covered with sprinkles and studded with various dried fruits and spices like fennel. I didn't make that. Instead, I made this lovely herb-y bread, which all went very quickly toward sopping up the onion sauce.

Stocafi | Salt cod stew | Recipe (scroll to "Le Stockfish")

I saw a few different variations on the name, but all are local adaptations of the English work stockfish, which itself is a misinterpretation of the Scandinavian term for white fish dried on a stick. It’s not even true stockfish that’s used, but rather bacalao, or salt cod. (Stockfish traditionally has no salt, it’s purely the passing wind that dries the fish-on-a-stick into eternal preservation.)

Anyway, stocafi is a seafood stew with a very Provençal assortment of ingredients: tomatoes, olives, potatoes, plenty of garlic, and a generous dose of olive oil. The dish was nice, though nothing special. We didn’t do the optional anchovy-garlic-basil puree at the end, perhaps we ought to have.

Pogne au fruits | Fruit cake | Recipe (scroll to "Le pogne au fruits")

Laura wanted cherries, so cherries she got. This is a fairly simple dessert, just fruits pressed into a fairly rich flat yeasted dough. And tasty!