Burnt salad? :-/

I wouldn't call tonight's attempt a "disaster," per se. I think the dish tasted good, but there are definitely still kinks in the cooking process.

So my friend S e-mailed me the other day and recommended I try making Matboucha, as it was something she had made herself once. I have a feeling she saw my previous post, where I expressed a desire to find Israeli salads that didn't include cucumber.

To my delight, my cookbook, The Book of New Israeli Cooking: A Culinary Journey, includes a recipe for Matboucha (Salata Matboucha translates to "cooked salad" in Arabic), which is one of many options when ordering Israeli Meze.

According to my cookbook, Meze is another term for something like "antipasti" or "tapas" -- where several small plates are put out on the table along with pita. The plates can be filled with salads, hummus, cheeses, fish, etc.

As S warned me, Matboucha is very tasty (and SPICY!!!), but time-consuming, so make sure you set aside a couple of hours just for preparation (and more if you need to bake some pita, like I did).

The trouble with my first attempt at Matboucha is that I definitely overcooked it -- even though the recipe specifically says to cook the veggies for two hours. By hour 1:30 the dish looked like the color of blackberries as opposed to a healthy blood-red tone. When all was said and done I probably shaved a good 40 minutes off of the cooking time, but it was still overdone, so if anyone has a better idea of how long to cook Matboucha, I'm all ears!

Matboucha
Recipe courtesy of The Book of New Israeli Cooking: A Culinary Journey, by Janna Gur

It can be eaten hot or cold.

Ingredients
4-5 ripe tomatoes
4 sweet red peppers
4 hot green peppers
8-10 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 cup oil
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 pinch sugar
1 tablespoon tomato paste

1. Using a sharp knife, cut a cross on the bottom of each tomato. Blanch the tomatoes briefly in boiling water, peel, halve, remove the seeds and chop coarsely.

2. Roast the red and green peppers over an open flame or under the grill. Allow to cool (preferably in a sealed plastic bag to make peeling easier), peel and remove the membranes and seeds. Chop coarsely.

3. Cook the tomatoes in a saucepan for 5-10 minutes, until all the liquid evaporates.

4. Add the remaining ingredients except the tomato paste. Lower the heat and cook for two hours, stirring occasionally (Note: I had the saucepan cooking over the lowest heat possible but two hours was definitely too much, even though the veggies are supposed to be slow-cooked. I would check the ingredients after cooking for an hour. If they're well-cooked, that should be enough.)

5. Add the tomato paste and cook for another 30 minutes (Note: Again, use your judgment. Since I had already overcooked the veggies, I maybe cooked them for five minutes more after adding the tomato paste). The salad is ready when it is shiny and very thick. Keep in the refrigerator up to 10 days or in the freezer up to three months. Bring to room temperature before serving.

Salad With a Kick

One of the few things I already knew about Israeli cuisine before reading The Book of New Israeli Food: A Culinary Journey was that salads are a core element to most menus. And as Ms. Gur even states ever so simply in the book, "Israelis insist on a salad with almost every meal." Can't say I take issue with that philosophy!

So the good news was I was relatively familiar with the basic Israeli salad of finely chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and fresh herbs -- trouble is, I really, REALLY don't like cucumbers :-/

If I try to make Israeli salad WITHOUT cucumbers, I feel the salad will be missing a vital component. It would be like American Idol without Simon Cowell (heh, well, we're going to have to get used to that eventually). 

I promise I will bite the bullet soon and make a full-on Israeli salad -- who knows? I may just like it! The picture of the juicy, succulent-looking veggies look too good to resist. But until I get up the nerve to bite into a cucumber, luckily my cookbook provides plenty of alternative salad choices.

Tonight I tried a Celery and Kashkaval Cheese Salad. And we have another winner! It's a delightful mix of crispy, crunchy celery strips with a tangy dressing of lemon juice and olive oil topped off with anchovies and the previously noted hard-to-find (and never-tasted by me or A before) Kashkaval cheese.

I managed to find the Kashkaval at Sahadi's, and I am pleased to announce that I have a new favorite cheese :-)

Kashkaval, while not an "Israeli" cheese (the one sold at Sahadi's is from Bulgaria), is a mild sheep's milk cheese that offers a nice balance to the zest of the celery salad. Plus it's great to nibble on its own! The recipe says you can use Parmesan if you can't track down Kashkaval, but if you can, I recommend going the extra mile for the Kashkaval. I have a feeling the tang of Parmesan isn't going to help balance out the already salty flavors of the salad.

Celery and Kashkaval Cheese Salad
Recipe courtesy of The Book of New Israeli Food: A Culinary Journey, by Janna Gur

Ingredients (serves 4-6)
1 bunch celery (one with young, light-colored stalks)
Freshly squeezed juice of 2 lemons
Coarse sea salt
10 top-quality anchovy fillets, diced
1/4-1/3 cup olive oil
3 1/2 oz ripe Kashkaval or Parmesan cheese
Coarsely ground white pepper

1. Discard the coarse outer stalks of the celery bunch and cut the inner stalks into thin strips. A vegetable peeler can be used to shave the stalks lengthwise.

2. Mix the celery strips with the lemon juice and some salt. Be careful with the salt -- the anchovies are salty already!

3. Mix the anchovy fillets with the olive oil and add to the celery strips.

4. Using the finest grater, grate the cheese over the salad, sprinkle some ground white pepper on top and serve immediately.