Today's stop on my culinary trip around the world is Bahrain, a small island country connected by bridge to the much larger Saudi Arabia. In fact, Saudi Arabia is almost 3,000 times bigger than Bahrain. As such, there's not much of a difference in the culinary culture of Bahrain vs. Saudi Arabia, so the dish I made for this country could actually be called a Saudi dish. The national dish according to Wikipedia is machboos, which is the national dish of two other Middle Eastern countries, and part of my goal is to cook a different meal for each country.
So I decided to make margoog, which is a meat and vegetable stew with "pasta" discs, kind of like a Middle Eastern chicken noodle or chicken and dumplings. But usually it's made with lamb and since I don't know of any vegetarian lamb substitutes, I just went with a tube of Lightlife sausage--I swear they don't pay me--since Trader Joe's (also not paying me) didn't have their veggie beef.
The "meat" and onions cook with some spices. Traditionally the all-purpose blend called baharat is used; I combined some of my own spices to mimic that blend. Baharat can vary by region or cook, but it generally includes warm spices like cumin, pepper, paprika, cloves, nutmeg, etc.
After the spices toast for a few minutes with the onions and meat, a couple cups of water are added. The recipe I used called for about 8 cups of water total, not counting the water that goes into the "pasta" dough. Luckily I recently bought a huge 8-cup pyrex measuring cup from an antique store. It's definitely come in handy quite a few times already.
Then a small amount of tomato paste is added, along with a couple grated tomatoes to form a loose sauce.
While that cooked down for a bit, I prepped my veggies. I used some cool rainbow cauliflower because I've been a bit disappointed in how orange and brown all my meals for this project have been. I'm ready for more colorful meals. Unfortunately most of the color cooked out of this cauliflower, but it was nice to look at while it lasted.
The cauliflower is added to the pot along with some carrots and more water, then simmered a little longer.
While the stew simmered, I started on the dough for the "pasta." I keep putting pasta in quotes because I'm not sure I could describe them as pasta, but that's how I've seen all the recipes online refer to them. The dough starts with whole wheat flour and sunflower oil.
Enough water is added to form it into a dough, then rolled out in a thin sheet to be cut out into small discs using the top of a drinking glass.
The recipe I used made way too many of these things to actually fit into the stew, so I saved some, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet.
The dough is dropped in a few at a time, then have to be very gently stirred into the stew. With thick pieces of vegetables and a lot of water, it was a little difficult getting everything stirred in without having things stick to the bottom or broken up too much.
Once all the dough is stirred in, it simmers for about 20 minutes more. Then even more veggies are added in, eggplant and zucchini.
Everything cooks together for 20 more minutes until the vegetables are soft enough but not completely falling apart.
I put lots of parsley on top, again because I feel like I need more pictures of some brighter colors. Without the parsley this would probably just be another orange-ish brown dish. I'm not sure if it's just me choosing more wintery foods to cook or if it's just that in Vermont currently the sun sets shortly after lunchtime so I don't have any natural light to bring out the nicer colors in the food. That's an exaggeration, by the way. But it is a little depressing to see the sun starting to go down around 3:30, and full sunset at 4:15. There's no chance for natural light in these photos right now, so I guess I have to accept it.
Kidding aside, though, this is a nice, warm, filling stew that's kind of perfect for winter. I said it reminds me of chicken and dumplings just because it's a stew with dough dropped into it. Obviously the flavors are much different, but the feeling of comfort you get from eating it is similar. Plus I've got about 3 more servings left over for lunches, which is always a plus!
Recipes Used: Margoog
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