Not to make excuses, but it’s been a really busy fall.  And Lesotho was tough to research. But here we are, three months after our last meal.

I’ve mentioned it before, but there are a number of other blogs doing a similar project to this one.  And among those, there’s… a range.

The gold standard was “Cooked Earth,” which absolutely bent over backwards for authenticity.  Tons of research, absolutely no ingredient substitutions.  If it was posted there, you could be more or less completely sure that you were, in fact, seeing an excellent attempt to replicate the food you would actually sample in the country in question.

However, this kind of approach was incredibly high effort.  The blog owner  went so far as to grow peppers from seed for one recipe.  The meals appeared infrequently, given the commitment, and eventually stopped at Chad.  Observent readers will note that we passed Chad something like four years ago.

The next tier down is “United Noshes.” While not QUITE as rigorous as “Cooked Earth,” the owners of United Noshes are very up front about their process, and they make explicit what their sources are and when they are making subsitutions.  They do extensive research, and frequently talk to natives of the country or people who have lived there.  They’ve received quite a bit of national media coverage, and we’d love to be invited to one of their meals before they finish. (Spoiler: we probably won’t be.)

We leaned heavily on Cooked Earth, and continue to lean heavily on United Noshes because they’re rigorous and cite their sources. We’d rather not JUST duplicate their recipes, but we could do a lot worse.

And then… there’s the rest of the cooking web.

We all know the joke. All you want is a lasagna recipe, but first you have to read through a lengthy story about the author’s childhood in Hoboken. But you know, we can’t really complain about THAT issue, because that’s literally all this blog is – we don’t even HAVE recipes, we JUST tell the story.  Frankly, I have no idea why you’re reading this.

The bigger problem is that there’s no way to tell where the hell the “authentic Basotho recipe” (Lasotho is the country, Basotho is the people) reposted by six different Instagram perfect white ladies from the midwest actually came from. They all just cite to each other, and are clearly cut and pasted from the same place.

On the theory that it’s not just a “Blink” situation where the recipes are stuck in a time loop, the recipes must have come from SOMEWHERE, but we’d like a BIT more to go on than that.

Our goal with this blog is NOT to present ourselves as experts, or a source for authentic cooking.  We’re looking to explore different foodways using alphabetical order as an inspiration.  As such we will never say “Try this authentic recipe from Lesotho!”, or “Basotho cuisine is amazing, as typified by this completely authentic recipe!.”

Rather, “We tried to make something that approximated Basotho cuisine.  In case you are interested, this was our experience, and here’s our sources.  Please feel free to use this as a starting point with those caveats in mind.”

Whew.  That’s a long introduction!  The reason it popped up for this meal in particular is that Lesotho is TOUGH to research.  It’s a quite poor country, and there’s apparently not a tradition of complex cuisines, so typical meals generally include dishes prepared simply with only a few ingredients. And dishes like that tend not to be terribly well documented.

But you know what – you can make some tasty food with just a few ingredients!

For our first dish, we’re making “bashed beef”.  This is very similar to the “Seswaa” we made for our meal from Botswana. You start with a hunk of brisket, and you boil it for several hours.

You then pound and/or shred the beef into small pieces.  This is where seswaa and Basothan bashed beef seem to diverge.  For the Botswanan recipe, the meat was dry fried to get crispy on the outside.  The Basotho version that we found is simmered with onions for an additional thirty minutes to make a thick, saucy coating.

At least, I think it is. Unfortunately, the source cited by United Noshes is a dead link, so we had to go to another food blog.  This LOOKS like the picture at United Noshes, anyway.

Pumpkin would probably be the most authentic vegetable to accompany this, but the beef recipe is part-and-parcel with a “potato and bitter greens” dish, so we made that.  Chard was available and fresh, so we went with that.

The potatoes and greens were finished with peanut butter at the very end, which is definitely a technique we’ve seen in other African recipes.  I’m a bit suspicious of the source, but I’m not going to argue that the results weren’t delicious, because they definitely were.

Finally, we made a simple stew of tomatoes, carrots, and onions. As simple as it was, this felt the most like something that you were likely to be served in Lesotho itself. The source of the recipe is a Peace Corps volunteer who spent extensive time in the country.

Put these together, and the final plate was colorful AND delicious!

Seriously, for such simple dishes, this was a stellar meal. The beef was rich and hearty, the carrot stew had a nice sweetness to it, and the potato dish was exceptional.  What’s not to like about peanuts and potatoes? We accompanied the meal with a bottle of ginger beer, since that’s a reasonably common South African drink.

And while dessert isn’t, apparently, a terribly common thing in Lesotho, we ran across this from another Peace Corps member:

“Desert, although not common in many traditional households, is almost always a baffling combination of jello and custard… Don’t ask. I have yet to discover why they can’t be served separately.”

OK, well – we can do that, can’t we?

What we can’t do, apparently, is take an even remotely decent PHOTO of Jello and custard.

And there you have it – a lot about our process, and a little about vaguely Lesotho adjacent food.  Next time, we remain in Africa for Liberia.

Recipes:
Lekhotloane (bashed beef) with Morogo-studded Potatoes
Tamati (tomato carrot stew) (This is the United Noshes link, so it includes everything they did for Lesotho)
Jello and custard: seriously, just read the instructions on the boxes.

We skipped Lativa, for supply chain reasons.

Specifically we needed a bag of something called “grey peas.”  While that doesn’t sound terribly appealing, our research assured us that the national dish of Latvia was Pelēkie zirņi ar speķi or “grey peas and bacon.” So grey peas it was.

The only problem is that it turns out that the only Latvian grocery store in Canada was in Toronto.  And they would happily ship us a $5 bag of peas for $30.  Um.

Fortunately, there was another way.  A good friend of ours lives in Toronto, and we would be seeing her in person in just a few weeks, so we asked her to smuggle a bag into Michigan, which we then smuggled back out again.

Our friend is in this picture, but is not the giant beaver:

To be clear, the beaver is our friend too.  Its name is Justin.

And now we had a bag of Latvian grey peas.  Which were brown.  And also labelled in Dutch.

But the internet assures us these are the right kind of peas.  Incidentally, the name “Kapucijners” is because the brown color of these grey peas is the same as the brown color of the robes worn by Capuchin monks.  Cappucino and Capuchin monkeys are also named for the same monks. None of which are grey.

So let’s make brown grey peas and bacon.  All the recipes for this dish are pretty similar, because this is a very simple dish, but we went with one from a Latvian grandma type on YouTube.  You can never go wrong with grandma videos.

The process is super easy.  You soak the peas overnight.  This could almost certainly be accelerated with a pressure cooker, but lacking specific directions for that, and having plenty of time, we just did the soak.

To prepare the dish, you boil the peas for an hour or so.  In a separate pan, you cook onion and bacon with some black pepper.

Then you combine the peas with the onions and the bacon and…

…actually, that’s it.

OK, what else shall we make to go with this?  How about a chilled soup?  That way we can pretend that it’s still summer, and not the start of the cold mud puddle that is a PNW fall.

The soup is also pretty simple.  You chop up and combine pickled beets, cucumber, radish, spring onion, parsley, dill, and hard boiled eggs, if you like that sort of thing. We don’t, so no eggs.  For liquid, you use kefir, a fermented milk we last encountered while making Icelandic rye bread.

Once you chop up the veg and pour in the kefir, you…

… oh wait, that’s done too.

There’s got to be SOMETHING difficult we could make for this meal.  Let’s make bread.  Bread is hard.  Here’s an “all the ingredients” picture for the bread.

Look at all those ingredients!  This must be hard.  First, you warm the buttermilk up to body temperature. Then you put everything in a bowl, and let the stand mixer go to town for fifteen minutes.  (Interestingly, this bread calls for 100% rye flour, which means it’s not going to rise all that much no matter WHAT we do to it.)

After pausing a few hours for the dough to not rise, you split it off to loaf pans, and try to ignore the fact that this dough feels more like the Play- than the bread variety. This would also have been an excelleint time to forcibly shape the bread a little better.

Once in the pans, we let it not rise for an additional half hour and then baked.  What we got out of the oven was… not the most attractive loaves of bread we had ever made.

It’s a nice cutting board, though, innit?  Gift from a friend.

Now, I’m being awfully dismissive of this bread, but you know what?  It honestly turned out pretty tasty.  The apple juice and buttermilk gave it a nice tangy kick, and while it was dense, it wasn’t tough.

So here’s our final spread – soup, peas, bread, and a can of sprats.  For our Estonian meal, we put Latvian sprats on a comnmercial loaf Estonian bread.  This time we put Latvian sprats on a loaf of bread we made ourselves.

In terms of cooking process, definitely one of the simpler meals we’ve made, but the results were excellent.  The beet soup was the standout – tart from the beets, creamy from the keffir, and redolent with dill.

I believe that’s the first time I’ve used the word “redolent” on this blog.  Sorry.  I’ll try not to let it happen again.

But the national dish – grey peas and bacon? Obviously comfort food.  The salty bacon and peas together made for a hearty and satisfying dish.  And like I said, the bread was completely acceptable, despite looking… well, like that.

We weren’t able to locate a bottle of balsam liqueur, which would have been the most appropriate drink, so instead we picked up a can of this not-at-all-Latvian beer:

A tasty meal, and we’ll be back in this neighborhood again in four countries or so.  But next up, Lesotho!

Recipes:
Grey Peas and Bacon
Chilled Beet Soup
Latvian Rye Bread

Those of you who take too many Sporcle quizzes may be immediately aware that we have skipped a country.  The next country in alphabetical order after Laos is Latvia.

Of course, given the amount of methodical consistency we have brought to the alphabet so far, the next country could very well be Narnia. However, we have actually skipped Latvia for a reason, and will return to it as soon as our supply chain issues resolve themselves.

Or maybe we’ll do Narnia next – how DO you make Turkish delight, anyway?

But for THIS meal, we are returning the Mediterranean for Lebanon. And we’re making almost nothing that we haven’t had before, made better, in a restaurant.  But these are national dishes that the country takes great pride in, and they are delicious, so who are we to argue?

First, lets try to make pita bread.  I don’t know if the flour I had available had soaked up an insane amount of water or what, but by carefully following the ratios in the recipe, we made… soup.  We had to add something like double the amount of flour the recipe called for to get a dough that even SORT of came together.

That’s supposed to be a ball, not a mush.  I really don’t know what happened.

When we cooked it on the stove, it didn’t puff up a LOT, probably because it was horribly overworked over the length of time the mixer was running as I desperately poured in more and more flour to try and get it to solidify.

That said, when we went to EAT it – it was fine.  Perfectly cromulent pita.  Just goes to show.

(I have no idea WHAT it goes to show, but there you are.)

(Wherever you are, I have no idea.)

OK, so what are we going to be eating with this pita?  Well, hummus, of course!  Israel and Lebanon have a huge rivalry over whose hummus is best and most original, so since we made Israeli style hummus for Israel, we decided to make Lebanese style hummus for Lebanon.  There’s just one problem with that…

…they’re exactly the same.  You can find recipes online for “Lebanese style hummus” or “Israeli style hummus,” and they all vary slightly in the proportions of lemon juice, tahini, and garlic.  But as far as we can tell, they vary within the same range.  The average values may be slightly different, but they are WELL with a standard deviation of each other.

So here’s some hummus – chick peas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic, salt.

Check.  What’s next?

Tabbouleh. The website we got our recipe from was at pains to explain that this is a parsley salad with a little bit of bulgur wheat, NOT a bulgur wheat salad flavored with parsley.  Still, very straightforward to construct – chop parsley, onion, scallion, mint, and tomato.  Season with sumac and 7-spice.  Just before serving, top with a bit of soaked bulgur and lemon juice.  Done!

Wait, 7-spice?  What’s that?  Well, since we’ll need it for the next dish, let’s talk about the two spice mixes that go into this.

So just as a reminder –  five spice is star anise, fennel, Sichuan peppercorn, cloves, and cinnamon. Thirteen spice is orange peel, cinnamon, cumin, ginger, angelica, Sichuan peppercorn, star anise, nutmeg, galangal, white pepper, cloves, licorice, cardamom. But those are both Chinese.

Lebanese seven spice is totally different. It contains turmeric, cinnamon, paprika, ground coriander, black pepper, cayenne, and cumin.

Well, SOME of those are different. Plus, the recipe we used added some garam masala as a base, which is ANOTHER spice blend. That’s actually a little odd, now that I come to think about it, but we just followed the recipe.

In addition to seven spice, the next recipe also calls for a blend called kahmouneh, or “kibbeh spices.”  Since we’re making kibbeh.  Kahmouneh contains cumin, dried rose petals (which we didn’t have), black peppercorns, marjoram (also left out), basil, mint, cinnamon, and 7 spice.  Which itself contains a whole bunch of spices plus garam masala.  Which in turn contains a whole bunch of spices.

It’s a spice-ception!

So what are we doing with these spices?  As alleged, we’re making kibbeh, which is basically either a meat ball or a meat pie, stuffed into (checks notes) more meat.

Specifically, the outer layer / crust is meat blended to a paste with bulgur wheat and spices.

The inner layer is sautéed onions with with much less finely ground meat, and lots more spices.

Now, there a few different ways to make kibbeh – you can make balls and deep fry them, or you can make a baked kibbeh in the oven.  Deep frying sucks at home, so we decided to go with the baked version.  You make a pie crust out of meat and bulgur (we’re using lamb and beef here, by the way.)

Then you fill the meat with meat.

Finally you add the top crust, which is made of (surprise!) meat, and score it before baking. We gave it a 9.7, but the Venezuelan judge only gave it an 8.3

After baking, it turned a lovely crisp color on top.

And here’s the final meal:

Not bad, right?  Nothing we haven’t had before, but all of it super tasty.

We also decided to make a cake for dessert called sfouf, which is a not terribly sweet cake made of a mix of semolina and regular flour, flavored with turmeric and rose water.

The preparation is pretty straightforward cake recipe – mix ingredients, pour in pan, bake.  The only really unusual thing is that I’ve never greased a pan with tahini before.

The cake was really striking in color:

It was, however, a bit thin.  I think we may have done the math wrong when we scaled it for our pan. But it was tasty! Not too sweet, and would go nicely with tea.

And that’s it!  We continue to think Lebanese food is awesome.  And since Leigh continues to despise anise flavored beverages, we didn’t bother with Arak.

Next up, either Lesotho or Latvia, depending on when we get to it.

Recipes:
Kibbeh
Tabbouleh
Hummus
Pita
Sfouf

Happy Canada Day, everyone! Let’s celebrate by turning to a country that’s adjacent to northern Thailand, Laos.

Laos has had a rough time of it in the 20th century.  Historically an important kingdom in its own right, it was occupied or dominated in turn by the France, Japan, France again, nobody (briefly), the Soviets, and then itself again.

As it turns out, this region is the source of a number of dishes we associate with Thai food in North America.  In particular, the meat salad known as “Larb” at most Thai places around here, but also transliterated as “Laap”, “Laab”, and any number of other variants, originates in this region.  It is also arguably one of the national dishes of Laos, so that’s what we’re doing today.

First up, a trip to the local southeast Asian grocery store.  Good news – this place is HUGE, so there are a wide range of fermented fish sauces available.  Bad news – there are a WIDE RANGE of fermented fish sauces available, but none of them is specifically Lao, so I got to spend an hour of decision paralysis trying to determine which of the dozen or so options is closest to padaek, an essential component of Lao cuisine.

I eventually went with a Vietnamese version that looked reasonably close to the illustrations I could find.  In addition, this meal will call for shrimp paste, crab paste, and fish sauce.  SO MUCH UMAMI.

I also have to figure out what to do with the rest of the bottles of this stuff – we’re not back to this part of the world for a WHILE, and I don’t think Latvia is going to be using a lot of crab paste.

The version of the recipe we decided to go for is out of the cookbook “Hawker Fare”, by James Syhabout, so no recipe link this week. While you can make laap with any number of different meats, we decided to go with pork, as it is fairly traditional, and not as expensive as, say, duck.

First up, we minced up about half a pound of pork shoulder.  This was an extremely noisy process, and we apologize to any neighbors who may have been disturbed. This is then browned off in a saucepan.

Next you mix in the sauce, consisting of shallots, rice powder, chilis (ground and chopped), fish sauce, fish paste, and MSG.

Have I mentioned that by itself, the fish paste is brown, chunky, and has an intensely fishy/cheesy aroma?  It is strong stuff.  But of course, you’re not eating it by itself, you’re mixing it with all the other ingredients and using it as flavoring.

And the salad is not JUST flavored meat – there’s also a big pile of herbs, including cilantro, culantro (yes, spell check, that IS a real word), mint, and scallions.

And… that’s it.  The TL;DR on the preparation here is – chop and brown meat, dump in a lot of flavorings and herbs, and stir.

The ubiquitous side dish would be Tum Som Mak Hoong, or “Green Papaya Salad.”  In theory, this could have required substantially more fussiness than the laap, in that you need to julienne a papaya.

The traditional / cheffy way to do this would be to peel the fruit, make a large number of vertical cuts very tightly spaced around the outside, then shave layers off to get a pleasing variety of sizes of crunchy papaya strips.

OR, and hear me out, you could realize that you have a julienne peeler sitting unused in the back of your knife drawer.

We’re not normally fans of single purpose kitchen gadgets (except the rice cooker, of course), but I was so happy to find this thing.  Papaya dispatched, it was time to make the dressing.  And THIS is where we really went full ham with the fermented seafood sauces, to badly mangle a metaphor.

The dressing for this one included shrimp, crab, and fish pastes, as well as fish sauce, garlic, lime juice and sugar.  It was also supposed to include actual salted crabs, but darned if I could find those at Supermarket 88.  Frankly, there was probably enough going on already.  Sauce and cherry tomatoes in, and you have your salad.

The final, absolutely mandatory, accompaniment to any Lao meal is sticky rice.  There are a number of ways to prepare this stuff.  Traditional would be to presoak for a long time in cold water, then steam.  We opted to use the method given here by “Hot Thai Kitchen,” and use a shorter boiling water soak, followed by steaming in a metal sieve.  Unfortunately, our sieve was a little too small for the quantity of rice, so the inner rice didn’t get done at the same rate as the outer layers.  But after some mixing and patience, and we eventually got a tolerable product.

And with that, here’s our complete Lao meal:

This one was GREAT.  All the fermented sauces made for some punchy, intense flavors, but we LIKE those. There was a ton going on in each dish, and the sticky rice let us scoop it all up and enjoy it.

I joked earlier that I have to figure out what to do with all these pastes now, but I think the answer is likely to be just: “Make it all again.”  Nothing says we have to go to the effort of chopping our own ground pork of a random weeknight – we try to make the full effort for the blog, but this could EASILY be a quick dinner on a Tuesday if you just use pre-ground pork.  Green papaya is a bit more of a specialty ingredient, but still readily available in Vancouver.

If you like Thai food, you’ll probably like Lao food, since there’s a LOT of overlap.

Next up, our first trip to Europe since Italy – Latvia!

No recipe link, but here’s the cookbook we used:
Hawker Fare

As we come to the end of the “K”s, we reach the country which is the unofficial mascot of the quiz website “Sporcle,” probably by virtue of it being SERIOUSLY challenging to spell correctly: Kyrgyzstan.

Kyrgyzstan is a central Asian country and former Soviet Republic sandwiched between China and Kazakhstan. The name comes from a Turkic word meaning “We are forty,” referring to forty historical clans in the region.  In reference to this, the flag has a forty-pointed star on it.

If you search for the national dish of Kyrgyzstan, you get beshbarmak. Now, where have we heard of that before?  Oh right, it’s the national dish of Kazakhstan, and we’ve already made it.  OK, Kyrgyzstan – what else you got?

Turns out we have oromo, a type of rolled dumpling.  Sounds great, lets do it!

Now, oromo is a general style of food, but the fillings can be a wide range of things.  The most authentic looking recipe that we found had a filling made of egg and Chinese chives.  But I don’t particularly LIKE scrambled eggs, and every source said that lamb was a pretty typical filling.  So we used the authentic recipe, but we replaced the eggs with lamb.

OK, how do you make these things?

First you make a basic egg dough.

And here is where I went wrong right off the bat. When the provided proportions of flour and water didn’t come together, I opted to add just enough water, and then knead the dough for quite a bit.  Although you can get a MILLION contradictory opinions on this when you search online, I suspect I overdeveloped the gluten, because I had a HELL of a time getting it to roll out as thinly as I wanted.

I managed to get it thinner than the WAY too thick dough we made for our Kazakh meal, but it still wasn’t great. It may be time to buy a pasta roller.

What about the filling?  Well, first you chop some onions, because of COURSE you chop some onions.

Also shown is a big batch of Chinese chives. Together with the onions, those get sautéed for a bit to soften and/or wilt.  Since the recipe for the lamb version of the filling said to put it in raw, that’s what we did.  We also generously seasoned the mixture with salt and pepper.

Finally, the filling gets spread onto the dough and rolled up.

Once it’s fully rolled up, you coil it into a circle and somehow fasten the two ends together. I was not good at this part. But here they are, ready for steaming.

And that’s it – you steam them for 15 minutes, and then bring them to the table.  Here’s one of the finished products, along with a cross section of a slice.

Nothing fancy here – dough, lamb, salt, pepper, onions.  But you know what?  It was super tasty.  Clotted cream would have been authentic here, but we topped it with yogurt, and the mix of tangy, salty, meaty, and… onion-y? was delicious.  Would absolutely eat again.

This was not our most elaborate meal, but it was definitely delicious, and the leftovers did not linger in the fridge.

Next up, we move on to the “L”s!

Recipes:
Oromo – the authentic seeming one
Oromo – the one with the lamb

We return to somewhat less shaky alphabetical ground with Kuwait.  Best known in the US as the country whose invasion by Iraq in 1990 precipitated the first Gulf War, Kuwait has a long and complicated history as a part of a number of empires, including the Greeks, the Persians, the Ottomans, and the British.  It gained independence in the 1960s, and for a time was the biggest oil exporter in the region, despite its small size.

The national dish of Kuwait is machboos, a dish consisting of spiced chicken or lamb, rice cooked in the meat stock, and a middle layer consisting of split peas, raisins, and onions.  We’re going to use the recipe published on “United Noshes” from someone named “Al.”  That’s capital A lowercase “ell”.  The recipe was NOT produced by AI, as far as we know.

To start, I had to do something EXTREMELY unusual, that has not come up a single time on this blog so far.

No, just kidding – I had to chop up an onion.

The other major bit of prep work before we could attack the chicken was to make a spice blend called bezar.  This involved toasting a number of different spices one at a time, since they all have different cooking times, then blending them in a grinder.

We don’t mind making our own spice blends, because toasting spices always makes the kitchen smell AMAZING.

One of the things that makes this dish complicated is that the chicken is cooked four different ways – it is poached, then seared, then braised, then baked.  To start with, the chicken is poached from the King’s forest in boiling water for ten minutes to start the cooking process, but also to flavor the cooking water into a stock.

Next up, we fry the aforementioned onions with some garlic.  Once they’ve softened a bit, the chicken goes in to get a bit of color on it.

This picture was taken BEFORE said color had started to appear. Once the chicken has a sear on it, you go in with the spices, water, and some tomato paste and let it braise.  And here we confront the fact that this is a “someone’s dad named Al” recipe, because we have directions like “cook until the chicken is soft and the sauce tastes amazing.”  Thanks, Al.

The rear pot is the dried yellow split peas getting underway in some boiling water. Once they’re tender, you cook some more onions, then mix them with the peas and the raisins and simmer some more.

But wait, we also need rice.  As per usual on this blog, we refuse to cook rice using any method OTHER than a rice cooker unless it’s absolutely necessary.  And it wasn’t in this case – the recipe explicitly contemplated using one.  The only distinctive feature here is that the rice is cooked in the chicken stock we made while we were poaching the chicken.

Finally, the braised chicken gets sprinkled with cinnamon and put in a pan to roast “until the smell is unbearable.”

This is the part where I suspect Al’s recollections leave something to be desired – we’re putting chicken in a hot oven with no liquid and no covering. Won’t this dry things out?

Well, as it turns out, yes, it does a bit.  In hindsight, I should have listened to my suspicion and looked at a few more recipes, which would have indicated to COVER the chicken, and possibly pour some oil over the chicken to keep it moist.

The recipe didn’t SAY to reduce the tomato sauce after braising the chicken, but it was a bit thin, so we left it on the heat while we took care of everything else. Here’s the whole pile, ready for assembly.

And here it is assembled.

That looks pretty doesn’t it?  Despite being a little dry, the flavor was excellent – we served the rest of the tomato sauce on the side, and it was absolutely delicious over the chicken, rice, and peas.  The only change I’d make, were I to make this again, besides covering the chicken in the oven, would be to add more raisins.  Their sweetness was an excellent contrast to everything else, but there weren’t ENOUGH.

Now, Kuwait is a strictly Islamic country – you can’t get so much as a beer at the airport. But I was able to locate one of the MOST popular drinks in the country.  I found it at a store called (checks notes) “Celtic Treasure Chest.”  Wait, what?

Apparently the frequent drink of choice in this middle eastern country is a blackcurrant  soda from Manchester.  I blame colonialism.  It’s usually safe to blame colonialism.

To finish the meal, we made a ring cake called Gers Ogili, Gers apparently just means “circle,” so this is the circle of Ogili.  It’s a fairly dense cake that uses rather a LOT of saffron, giving it an intense yellow color.

You whip eggs and sugar together in one bowl, put your dry ingredients in a second, and your wet ingredients in a third. In addition to the aforementioned saffron, the cake also contains rosewater and cardamom.

The batter was baked in our (newly acquired for this purpose) bundt pan, and produced a dense, delicious cake with a really striking appearance.

And that’s Kuwait!  Only one more “K” country to go, and it’s probably one of the hardest countries to spell in the entire world.  Stay tuned!

Recipes:
Machboos
Gers Ogali

If North Korea had a paucity of choices, South Korea is the opposite – there’s so much good stuff that it was hard to narrow it down.  Korean Fried Chicken is definitely having a moment, at least in Vancouver – you can’t throw a stick without hitting a new place.  (Although they have politely requested that people stop throwing sticks at their restaurants.)

However, deep frying at home sucks, so we decided to do something else.

First up, however, is the absolutely mandatory Korean side dish / condiment / national dish – kimchi!  And the reason it’s first up is that it takes a bit of time to ferment properly.  So with our meal scheduled for Saturday evening, we took Tuesday night to get the cabbage going.

I made another trip out for supplies, and discovered that the Korean supermarket not only sells WHOLE Napa cabbages, but you can also buy half and quarter portions, too.  Which is a good thing, because half a Napa cabbage still represents about six pounds of cabbage! To start, you salt all the leaves and then leave it to soak for a few hours.

Ideally, you leave it to soak in a basin larger than the cabbage itself, but we don’t HAVE a basin larger than even HALF of one of these beasts.

Once it’s ready, you cook some glutinous rice flour and sugar in water to make a sticky base for the sauce, the rest of which consists of garlic, ginger, onion, fish sauce, fermented shrimp, and a LOT of gochugaru. (Korean red pepper flakes.)  Like, a LOT a lot.

Or, at least, you’re SUPPOSED to put in the fermented shrimp, and not just buy them and then leave them in the freezer like an idiot.  Sigh. (We added a little bit to the Kimchi right before serving, at the suggestion of our guest.)

Once the sauce is mixed, you also add in some thinly sliced carrot, green onion, and daikon radish.  Also something called “water dropwort,” but in this case the store didn’t have it. And then you get messy!

To do this right, you have to get in there and smear sauce on each and every cabbage leaf.  It takes a while.  But once you’re done, that’s it!  Kimchi goes into containers on the counter to ferment for a day or two, and then into the fridge.

For our main dish, we’re making bulgogi. Turns out this literally means “fire meat.” Can’t argue with that.  But also can’t actually use fire, since we’re on the fourth floor now.  But that’s a problem for Saturday us.  First, FRIDAY us has to make up a tasty marinade.

Obviously, there’s many different recipes.  The one we went with included Korean pear, onion, garlic, ginger, green onion, soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, black pepper, and carrot.  As it turns out, pureed pear looks EXACTLY like pureed onion, but you don’t want to get those two confused!

We mixed that up, smeared it over some nice thinly sliced top sirloin, and that went into the fridge as well.

Saturday, it was time to put everything together, as well as make our side dishes.  And for extra special nervous making, we had invited an actual Korean person over to share the meal! For those keeping score at home, this is the third time we have done this – the first two were Brazil and Italy.

As mentioned last week, Korean meals typically have a range of side dishes, or banchan.  If you count rice (you probably shouldn’t) we’d be having three.  The only interesting thing to say about the rice is that short-grain sushi rice, like we used last week, appears to be the standard tabletop rice in Korea.

Next up, a nice simple dish with bean sprouts.  A quick blanch in boiling water, then mix together with garlic, fish sauce, and sesame oil.  Done.

Our final banchan involves potatoes.  While potatoes are originally native to the Americas, they are at this point a staple just about everywhere, and that definitely includes Korea.  This is another simple one – fry potatoes and onions in oil, and then glaze with soy sauce, garlic, and sugar. (The picture was taken in the “pre-glazing” portion of the program.)

For the very final step, the bulgogi came out of the fridge, and was slapped onto a hot cast iron grill to quickly cook.  So quick, that I didn’t even remember to snap a picture.

Given that, let’s skip to the final spread!

Clockwise from upper left, we have lettuce for wrapping, kimchi, soy sauce potatoes, chewy sweet rice flour desserts that our guest brought, seasoned bean sprouts, bulgogi, and rice.  Looks pretty tempting, doesn’t it?  Here’s a pile of everything on a plate:

Om nom nom.  This was SO good.  My only complaint would be that I didn’t cook the potatoes long enough, so they were a bit too crunchy.  But the flavor of everything was great, and in particular, we nailed the kimchi.  Our guest (who we COMPLETLY FORGOT to take a picture with, as usual) said that she couldn’t believe we had done it ourselves from scratch, and that it was an excellent job.

Normally, I’d be concerned that she was just being polite, but not this time.  We did an excellent job.

You may be wondering about the liquid in the glass.  We had not one but TWO Korean beverages available for the meal.

The one on the left was brought by our guest, and is called Sujeonggwa, or cinnamon punch.  It’s quite sweet, but it tastes of cinnamon and dried persimmon.  In other words, it’s fall in a glass.

The one on the right is Makegolli, which is a fermented sparkling rice wine.  Our guest was quite surprised that we had a bottle on hand, but it turns out there’s a local store quite close to us that specializes in making the stuff.

They’re also not technically allowed to sell alcohol for takeaway unless you buy food, because they are not a liquor store.  So I bought a scone.  They also have a basket of $1 Rice Krispie treats by the door, if you REALLY don’t want to shell out too much extra.

That aside, Makegolli is ALSO delicious.  There’s a little chart on the bottle to show how the levels of “sour”, “sparkly” and “sweet” change over time.  This was a quite young bottle, so “sweet” was the dominant of the three.

And finally, dessert!  These tasty little packages, called gyeongdan, are just rice flour with a little sugar syrup inside, but they were a great conclusion to a hearty meal.

And that’s it for South Korea!  We had a wonderful time with our guest, and will be eating leftover kimchi for WEEKS.  Next up, we have to decide if we’re doing Kosovo – they’re recognized by more countries than not, but they aren’t on the UN list.

Recipes:
Kimchi
Bulgogi
Soy sauce potatoes
Seasoned mung beans

Let’s get something out of the way right up front – alphabetical order is a social construct.  Sure, we could put North Korea under “N”.  That would make more sense, probably.  Or we could put it under “D” for DPRK, which is what the United Nations does.  After all, we put the “Democratic Republic of the Congo” there.

But we didn’t.  We’re putting it here. Moving on.

North Korea is one of the most secretive states on the planet.  Not for nothing is it called “The Hermit Kingdom.”  And while there is a long traditional food culture in that part of the Korean peninsula, our understanding is that your average North Korean is more likely to be hungry than they are to be feasting on traditional delicacies.

So we’re going to split the difference here – we’re going to attempt to make one relatively modern North Korean dish, which was born out of the need to make something from very little.  And to balance it, we’re also going to make a more traditional dish from the North.

All of this also has our usual caveats applied – we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re not very good at research, and a number of approximations, both intentional and un- have inevitably crept in.

The good news is that there are a number of excellent Korean supermarkets in Vancouver, so ingredient hunting was pretty straightforward.

Look at all this neat stuff!  You can tell it’s Korean by the Chinese characters on the bean curd sheets, and the Japanese ones on the mustard paste. The buckwheat noodles are at least DEFINITELY Korean, although on closer inspection they turned out to be sweet potato, and not buckwheat. Look, we’re trying, OK?

For our “modern make the best of it” dish, we’re making Injo Gogi Bop.  This literally means “artificial meat rice.”  This sounds worse than it is – the dish is actually just sushi rice inside a bean curd wrapper, with a flavorful sauce. Done right, the texture is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike meat.

Lots of sources talk about this dish, (here’s the Wikipedia article) but very few provide an actual recipe.  We consulted our friend Ji Hyun for advice and she came through with a recipe.  Thanks Ji Hyun!  Weirdly, the only recipe on the English language internet that she found for us was from… a German meal kit site.  She also found a video of some nice German people attempting to make it.

OK, so how do you do this?  Rather than making bean curd wrappers from scratch, which is part of the origin of this dish, we opted to follow the meal kit route by buying ours premade and soaking them.

And this is the first place we went wrong – the meal kit site doesn’t say how LONG you need to soak these for.  Opinions vary on the internet, but several hours is the low end, and we hadn’t allowed that.  So they never really unfurled the way they were supposed to.

Next up, you make sushi rice.  Rice cooker. Bam.

Finally, you make a sauce by frying some onions, green onion, and garlic together, then mixing that with soy sauce and Korean chili flakes.

This is actually where 95% of the flavor in this dish comes from, and it wasn’t half bad at all.

The final assembly, in theory, consists of rolling out the beautifully flat soybean sheets, putting a dollop of sushi rice in each one, and then rolling them up to make a nice “meaty” little package.

In practice, our sheets never really unrolled, so we ended up having to make bean curd – rice – bean curd sandwiches instead.

For our second, more old-school dish, we decided to make a cold buckwheat noodle recipe called Mul Naengmyeon. I mentioned that the noodles we purchased did not seem to contain much buckwheat, but it turns out that’s not disqualifying – there’s a whole family of noodles that works for this dish, and the ones we bought seem to fall comfortably within it.

Being a cold dish, there wasn’t a LOT of complex prep here.  Cook noodles in boiling water, shock in ice bath. They had a fascinating translucent color.

Top with broth (yes, out of a bag – we went lazy), slices of cucumber and Korean pear, and serve with mustard paste and vinegar on the side.

Finally, we made a banchan.  If you’ve eaten in a Korean restaurant, you know that meals tend to be served with a bunch of tasty little side dishes called banchan.  We were already making two mains, so we went with just one side, a cucumber and sesame salad.

And here’s the final spread, with the sauce on the Injo Gogi Bap.

Sure looks a mess, doesn’t it? Still, the important thing is taste, right?  And this poverty food, born out of necessity and desperation was… actually pretty tasty!  It’s hard to go wrong with garlic, soy, and chili as a seasoning mix.  The noodles had a fun chewy texture, although I would say they definitely needed the mustard and vinegar to perk them up a bit.  And our banchan, while basic, was also quite good.

And that was Korea, North!  Next up, we’re staying in the “Ks” with, surprise, surprise, Korea, South.

Recipes:
Injo Gogi Bap
Mul Naengmyeon

One of the struggles of this project is to not simply cut and paste our recipes from other bloggers who have taken on this task.  Especially since they’re mostly doing a better job.

In particular, United Noshes is doing a really exceptional job.  They have dinner parties.  They donate to charity.  They’ve been on NPR.  Have WE been on NPR?  No we have not.  Are we doing nearly a careful or accurate enough job to WARRANT being on NPR?  Also no.

But when United Noshes says they are unable to identify much, if any, of a distinct food culture for a country, we know we’re not going to do any better.  In order to avoid just copying them, I will generally do quite a bit of Googling, as well as checking actual cookbooks.  But in this case?

Nope – we’re just copying them.

To get a few things out of the way:

Kiribati is an island nation in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It is the 172nd largest country in the world by surface area, putting it between Sao Tome and Principe, and Bahrain.  By population, it is 178th. On the other hand, they have bent time and space to their will.

By which I mean there’s a big diversion in the international date line which Kiribati unilaterally declared in order to have the entire country be on the same day of the week as their major trading partner, Australia.

Can you guess where Kiribati is in this picture?

Two more facts before we get onto the food.  1) The name of this country is pronounced “Kiribass”. 2) Kiribati is very likely to be the first country we lose entirely to climate change.

OK, so before that happens, what are we making?  Two dishes – fried parrotfish, and pumpkin simmered in coconut milk.

Both are VERY simple, as befits a country with very little land area for cultivation of herbs and spices.  Let’s start with the fish.  Parrotfish are actually found all over the world, but since they are also found in the freezer at my local Supermarket 88, we decided to ape United Noshes and go with that.  After all, we can’t argue with this irrefutable evidence:

That’s more or less exactly what the frozen one looked like.

Uncanny, isn’t it?  I am NOT good at gutting, scaling, or filleting fish, as has already been established in this project, but fortunately, parrotfish have BIG scales, so it’s easy to tell when you’ve gotten them all.  A great deal of utterly terrible knife work later, and we had this.

And a quick fry in oil later, we had this.

That would appear to be fried fish, all right. To be clear, I used absolutely no seasoning or breading of any kind.  Just patted them dry with paper towels and hurled them into the oil.

For our other dish, we made Te bwaukin, or pumpkin simmered in coconut milk with pandan leaf.  And there’s really not much more to it than that.  There’s literally only one ingredient (sugar) that isn’t listed in the title of the recipe.

Chop up pumpkin. (shown here mid chop)

Put in a pot with coconut milk, sugar, and some pandan leaves.

The pandan leaves are interesting.  They have a really lovely, sweet fragrance, and are used for seasoning desserts all over Oceana and southeast Asia.  Our entire fridge now smells like pandan, and I am not complaining.

And with that, we’re done.  Here’s dinner:

Simple, isn’t it?  The nice thing about saltwater fish is that they taste just fine when you cook them without any seasoning.  It was a nice crunchy piece of flaky fish.  And the pumpkin was so sweet (if a bit mushy) that it was basically a dessert.  Nothing fancy here, but as authentic as we were likely to get, and nothing we wouldn’t eat again.

Thanks Kiribati!  We hope everyone gets out safely.

Next up, due to our refusal to file it under “N” or “D”, we have Korea, North.

Recipes:
Fried Parrotfish: Seriously, just toss it in hot oil for 12 minutes or so.
Pumpkin Simmered in Coconut Milk

For previous Christmas day meals, we’ve sometimes tried to make what would be traditional for the holiday in that country.  Not so much on this Christmas, but it was nice having the day off to cook.

Kenya is on the east coast of Africa, and has historically had a wide range of visitors, from Zheng He to Vasco de Gama. The colonial era wasn’t any less awful than anywhere else, but modern Kenyan society represents a wide range of intra- and extra- African influences.

When you google “national dish of Kenya,” the main result is ugali, or cooked cornmeal, used as a base to consume other dishes.  So we’ll make that.  Hot water, cornmeal.  Bam.

OK, what else?

We settled on two dishes, a veg and a curry.  The veg was also pretty simple: sukuma wiki, which literally means “stretch the week.”  It would traditionally be made with whatever vegetable was readily available in season to provide a filling means of pushing the food budget.  Collard greens would be very authentic, but those don’t turn up in our local Canadian grocery store all that frequently.  So kale it is!

Note: for a number of years, Leigh and I took part in an absolutely amazing scavenger hunt called “GISH”.  It is a running joke in GISH that kale is always redacted. Here is the only GISH item that I personally ever managed to get included in the annual coffee table book.  It has nothing to do with this meal, but I’m going to use this excuse to include it anyway.

So anyway, to make Sukuma Wiki, you simply Sautee some onions, wilt in some [redacted], and then finish with heavy cream.

Bam. Done.  What else?

For our main dish, we are making a chicken curry called kuku paka. This is an abbreviation of “kuku wu kupaka”, which literally just means “chicken in sauce.” It’s a coconut milk based curry featuring not terribly exotic ingredients.

First, you marinate the chicken using chili powder, garlic, lemon and salt.

Mmm.. gros salt.

Next, you make a curry base consisting of onion, tomato, chilies, and cilantro.

Knife for… scale?  To show we mean business?  Not sure. Moving on…

The base gets pureed and then cooked with some spices for a bit to get rid of the raw onion taste.  Once it’s ready, you add coconut milk to make it creamy.  Meanwhile, you broil the marinated chicken until it’s done and a bit charred in spots.

Chicken and pan juices go in the pot with the sauce and everything gets simmered for a bit, and finally the whole thing is finished with a bit more heavy cream.  And with that, we’re ready to bring everything to the table!

My goodness, isn’t that pretty?  We’ve made some fairly beige meals on this journey, (looking at you, Iceland), but this was not one of those.  And in addition to being fun to look at, it was TASTY.  The richness of the coconut milk combined with the spices in the curry made for a hearty, satisfying meal.  The [redacted] was crunchy and rich with cream, and the ugali was… fine.  It was fine.  It soaked up the sauce nicely.

Next up, we return to Oceana for a country that isn’t pronounced the way you think it is.

Recipes:
Kuku Paku
Sukuma Wiki
Ugali