Some of these meals go better than others.

Sometimes it’s clear we’ve made pretty close to exactly the dish that was intended, and we decide that it’s just not our favorite.  No shade on national foodways, just individual preferences.

And sometimes it’s clear that we just didn’t get there.

This, friends, is one of the latter.  I’m pretty sure we hit the flavor spot on (and the flavor was great!) but in terms of appearance or composition?

Well, the salad was pretty close, anyway.

So – Lithuania.  The third of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia and Latvia. The national dish is something called a Cepelinai, which literally means “Zeppelin.”  That’s right – we’re making potato blimps!

First off, you make a fairly simple filling of pork and onions.

Pretty typical fare for a pork meatball.  Just for variety, let’s NOT take a picture of chopping an onion.  After all, this filling isn’t precooked – it’s just mixed together and left to chill a bit while you mess with the potatoes.

SO MANY POTAOTES.

First, you take a small quantity of potatoes, boil and rice them  Ricing a potato is a task made much easier by a tool called a potato ricer.  Which we don’t have.

Then you take a lot MORE potato and you shred it.  And I think this is where we went wrong.  We used the “grater” attachment on our food processor to grate the potatoes, because who has time to hand grate four entire Idaho Russets with a microplane?

People who actually know how to make Lithuanian food correctly, that’s who. Although the shredded potatoes matched the images in the recipe we were using, when I went and checked a few more sites, their shreds were much smaller than the ones we got.

Another possible point of failure is the next step, where you take that shredded potato and attempt to squeeze out as much moisture as you possibly can.  Ideally using cheesecloth.  Which we also didn’t have.

Using a dishtowel and a TON of arm force (seriously, between this and last week, why aren’t I buff yet?) we got out quite a bit of liquid, but possibly not enough.  It’s also possible that the potato starch that was supposed to be in the liquid got trapped in the towel, because when we tried to pour off the liquid and keep the starch we didn’t get much.

We also may have just done a crap job of pouring off the liquid.

So at any rate, we now have a bowl of riced potatoes, a bowl of dry potato gratings, and a (very small) bowl of potato starch.  Those then get recombined together to make the cepelinai dough.

We then make large dumplings out of this dough and the pork filling.

A layer of dough, a dollop of filling, combine and you have your Zeppelins:

Now obviously, these are called Zeppelins because they are quite large for a dumpling.  But honestly, if I had to describe their size and shape, something else comes to mind.  What was it, again?

Oh right.  A potato.

Seriously, we just painstakingly disassembled a whole pile of potatoes just so we could reassemble the same number of potatoes, but with meat inside.  Cool.

And if we had stopped there, our dumplings would have looked more or less exactly like the ones in the recipe, just MASSIVELY less safe to eat.  However, we decided that we would prefer our pork cooked, and not knowing what was in store, we tossed these into boiling water for 25 minutes.

While that was going on, we made the dressing and the salad.  Remember earlier, when I said I wasn’t going to show a picture of chopped onions in this one?

I lied.

The dressing for these dumpling is made from bacon, onions, and sour cream.  You try to time it so the onions and bacon are cooked just as the dumplings are ready, then you mix in the sour cream at the last minute and put the dressing over them.  We did succeed at getting the dressing on the table at the right moment, and we put them over…

Well, let’s do the salad, first.

This won’t take long – it’s a simple chopped salad, so all we have to do is show the ingredients.

Prunes, walnuts, beets, lemon juice, and olive oil.  In the summer, mayonaise would be more typical than the lemon juice / olive oil combination, but I think we’d probably still prefer this version.

OK, I can’t put this off any longer – what happened to the dumplings?

Well, whether it was insufficient potato starch, insufficiently riced potatoes, too large a grate size on the grated potatoes, too much moisture, bad assembly technique, or (most likely) a combination of all of those, they completely fell apart in the boiling water.

So instead of potato blimps, we had bare meatballs, floating in a pot of boiled potato shreds.

But to be clear – everything was still COOKED.  You still had cooked potato shreds and a cooked meatball. So we just sort of made a big pile of stuff and dumped dressing on it.

Less, “Zeppelin”, and more “Hedgehog.”  Google Translate helpfully informs me that the Lithuanian word for hedgehog is “ežys”.  So we made that.

And you know what?  It was delicious.  Potato, pork, onion, bacon, sour cream?  These are classic flavors, and they work no matter what kind of Erinaceidae you shape them like. And while I hadn’t had prunes in a salad before, this was an excellent combination.  If we were to make this again (not unlikely), I would try to get some really good olive oil, as the flavor of the oil was well featured in the balance of flavors.

OK, Lithuania – we may have butchered your national dish, but it was still tasty nonetheless.  Maybe you will try our Ežys version in the future?

Maybe not.

Next up: Luxembourg, and then on to the Ms!

Recipes:

• Cepelinai
  • The one we used
  • The one we SHOULD have used
• Beet Salad

Ever since we’ve been together, which at this point is now 22.5 years and counting, Leigh and I have joked that we want to take a tour of the tiny countries of Europe.  Not Luxembourg, of course, that’s WAY too big.

No, we’re thinking Andorra, Liecthenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican.

As this tour is not terribly PRACTICAL, we have yet to accomplish it.  But hey – it’s only been a quarter century – we’ve got time.  And we WILL likely be visiting Liechtenstein this summer, so stay tuned for exciting pictures of (checks notes) llamas. Wait, what?

At any rate, this entry deals with the tiny country of Leichtenstein, located high in the Alps between Swtitzerland and Austria.

Two fun facts about Liecthenstein:
1. It has now lost two games in a row to the worst soccer team in the world.
2. Famously neutral Switzerland has either invaded or fired artillery into Liechtenstein numerous times in the last 60 years. Despite this, the two countries still somehow have very close relations.

There are two plausible candidates for national dish of Liechtenstein, and neither is terribly difficult to make, so we did both.  Let’s start with the less decadent one – Ribel.

Ribel is a porridge made of corn meal and milk. Boil milk with a little butter and salt, add corn meal, remove from heat, wait fifteen minutes.  It’s so quick we didn’t even get a picture of the preparation, although you’ll see it in our final picture.  Ribel is often eaten for breakfast, with jam or sour cheese.  Not much more to say about it, honestly.

So let’s get on to the MORE decadent one – Käsknöpfle!

Knöpfle is the Swiss German term for spaetzle, little chewy pasta bits that you may be familiar with.  We made a somewhat related Hungarian version, nokedli, when we did that meal. Käs, on the other hand, is the Swiss German word for cheese. Pasta covered in cheese.  Oh my god, what’s not to like HERE?

OK, so first order of business was to acquire cheese.  As long as you use a mix of alpine cheeses, you’re going to be in the right balpark.  We went with Apenzeller and Gruyere:

However, a truly authentic Liechtensteiner Käsknöpfle also uses something called “Sura Käs”, literally “sour cheese.”  This is a regional specialty from the Swiss / Liechtenstein / Austrian Alps that DOES NOT travel well, and as such is basically impossible to find in North America.

After some conversation with the friendly staff at the cheese shop, we decided that an appropriate way to get some tagniness into the mixture would be to use French “fromage blanc.”

This stuff’s pretty good – it basically tastes like mild sour cream, with a textrue closer to cream chease.  I’ve been eating the leftovers spread on bread with jam for breakfast.

Much grating later, and we had a big bowl o’cheese.  Which I appear to have forgotten to photograph.  Fortunately, I did get a picture of a cutting board full of onions, because lord knows there’s no way I couldn’t have just borrowed one of those from literally any prior entry in this blog.

But no, rest assured, dear reader, that these are the ACTUAL onions we used for THIS recipe.  We spare no effort for authenticity.* (*note: we spare MANY efforts.)

OK, cheese grated, oinions browning, time to make the dough – and here is where we ran into a slight problem.  We grabbed a family recipe from r/Liechtenstein that sounded nicely authentic.  However, it turns out the author had made a SLIGHT typo in their units, and called for 100 cL of water instead of 100 mL of water.

When you put 10 times the amount of water called for in a dough recipe, it becomes batter.

To be fair, this is really my fault – I should have looked at the amount of flour, looked at the LITER of water ready to go, and thought to myself, “Self: you have done a lot of cooking at this point.  Perhaps you should maybe double check this against another recipe before you pour this all in.” Sadly, dear reader, I did not.

The author of the reddit post was quite gracious when we asked about it later, and the post has since been corrected.  And once we adjusted, the recipe was great, so we’re very grateful to them for sharing it.

Just to see what would happen, we tossed in a cup of sugar and tried baking this, and it turns out what happens is a thick, gummy, pancake.

Could have tried baking it longer, I suppose.  But who has time to pay attention to the leftovers when there are CHEESY DUMPLINGS to be made?!?

Second batch of batter mixed (we used double the eggs, in line with a few other recipes we found), and allowed to sit for a little bit, we were just about ready to go.

Now all we needed was a Knöpflehobel.

“A what now?” we hear you ask.  A Knöpflehobel!  Actually, we didn’t have one of those, so we used a Spaetzle press that my colleague Stephan was kind enough to loan us. Eggs for scale.

This is a NON trival piece of kit.  And the dough is quite thick, so forcing the dough through the press into a pot of boiling water took some serious effort.  I don’t always make Käsknöpfle, but when I do – it’s arm day.

These things actually cook pretty quick.  Only a minute or two in the boiling water, and out they come.  After a few batches, we had a bowl full of dumplings.

At this point, all that was left to do was dump the käs into the knöpfle, mix well to let everything blend and get gooey, and then plate everything up with some applesauce and cherry jam.  Our local liquor store, which is generally excellent, somehow failed to have ANY Liechtensteiner beer in stock, so we went with a nice Austrian lager instead.

From upper right, working clockwise, Käsknöpfle with fried onions, Riebel with cherry jam, applesauce. Not the most chromatically varied meal, but oh my goodness… who cares? The cheese on the knöpfle was gooey and pungent and AMAZING.  Could probably have used even a little more tartness from the fromage blanc, but this recipe is unquestionably a winner.

The Reibel was fine – a bit less exciting, but a good side dish.  The jam was definitely an important part of keeping it interesting.  And the apple sauce did help cut the richness of the Käsknöpfle.  All in all, an excellent meal, and I can’t wait to try the real thing when we’re in Peru this summer.  I mean Liechtenstein.

Llamas? Really?

Next up, back to the Baltics!

Recipes:
Käsknöpfle – (We used 8 eggs instead of 4)
Riebel – (The recipe says “1/3 water and 2/3 milk.”  Pretty sure that means 1/3 LITER of water and 2/3 LITER milk.)

For our third African country in this streak, we head to Libya, which makes for a nice variety – Lesotho in the far south, Liberia in the west, and Libya on the Medditeranean coast.

One fun thing we’re learning is the variety of different ways the same ingredients are used around the world.  I’ve joked that at some point we’ll run the statistics on how many entries on this blog start with “Now chop up an onion”, but there’s other parallels as well.

For example, our Irish meal was a lamb stew with barley.  THIS is a lamb stew with barley.  But despite the fact that the top line description is the same, these two dishes are (unsurprisingly) nothing alike.

For starters, rather than whole barley, this recipe calls for barley flour.  Now, we didn’t find barley flour at any of our nearby stores, but rather than go further afield, we just bought barley, and stuck it in a barely-on oven for a bit to dry it out. (or is that a BARLEY-on oven?  har, har, har)

We then fed it in batches through our spice grinder.  Took a bit, because barley is quite hard, and we didn’t want to burn out the motor, but eventually we had a nice bowl of barley flour.  Just to be sure, we sifted the bowl, and anything that didn’t make it through the sieve went back into the grinder for a bit.

OK, so – what are we DOING with this barley flour?  We’re making bazeen, one of the national dishes of Libya.  It consists of a single large dumpling, which is then broken apart and used to eat a spicy lamb stew.

Alright, what do we do first? It couldn’t possibly be chop up and sautee an onion, could it?

Natch.

Also visible in that picture are chopped green chiles and fenugreek seed.  We always have to pause when a recipe just calls for “fenugreek,” because both the leaves and the seeds are used in different parts of the world, and the taste is substantially different.  In this case, however, our original recipe had lots of pictures, so we were able to confirm that seeds were intended here.

To be clear, we don’t MIND that most recipes start with sauteeing onions, because sauteeing onions smell delicious, and the spices didn’t hurt that at all.

Next up, lamb, and in this case we used shoulder, because leg is three times as expensive. The recipe just shows this going in as big hunks, so big hunks we did.

This goes into the pot with the onions to brown a bit, and then in go the remainder of the spices and broth.  Spices in this case are garlic, tomato paste, tumeric (LOTS of tumeric), chili powder (lots of that, too), black pepper, and salt.

After the lamb has cooked for about an hour, you toss in some potatoes to cook in the by now extremely aromatic broth.

And with about 45 minutes to go on the stew, it’s time to get moving on our dumpling.  And at this point, I was starting to seriously doubt our process, since it was so unlike anything we’d done before.  But again – the initial recipe had PICTURES, so we could tell we were at least matching it.

To make the dumpling, you dump a mix of barley and wheat flour into a pot and pour boiling water around it.  You also make a well in the middle of the flour for water to bubble up into. And then… you don’t stir, and you don’t cover.  Which means that at the end of the cooking process you still have a whole bunch of visible, dry flour.

This can’t be right, can it?  It’s still largely a powder! But it is apparently a COOKED powder, so… that’s OK?

We decided to soldier on and see what happens.  Flour and water gets dumped into the stand mixer (or kneaded by hand, if you have asbestos fingers) and kneaded to a somewhat gluey dough.

And then supposedly you roll that dough into a big ball, but  … wait, that worked?

Huh.  OK, let’s plate this puppy.

This… looks almost exactly like the picture in the recipe, with the exception that we left out the hard boiled eggs, because we don’t actually LIKE hard boiled eggs. We were somewhat baffled that we had succeeded, but it appeared that we had.

The instructions say that you tear off pieces with your right hand and eat the stew that way. Problem: at no point is it revealed when you change “large hunks of potato and lamb” into “bite sized pieces of potato and lamb.”  So after one or two attempts at tearing bits of lamb off with our fingers, we just went and got cutlery.

It was definitely tasty, though!  The dumpling didn’t taste raw, and was a nice chewy sop for the stew.  The lamb and potatoes also both did good jobs of soaking up the sauce.  We had lots of leftovers on this one, and they all got eaten.

Next up, a country which has now lost two football matches in a row to the worst team in the world.

Recipe:
Bazeen

Liberia is a country in West Africa.  The simplest narrative is that it was settled by freed American slaves who wanted a less oppresive life back in the land of their ancestors. The capital is even named for U.S. President James Monroe.  What a nice story.

Except… it wasn’t exactly deserted when the colonists from the colonies arrived, and the Americo-Liberians treated the indigenous population pretty badly, not even allowing them citizenship until 1904.

Liberia was one of only two countries (the other being Ethiopia) NOT colonized by Europeans during the “scramble for Africa”, and supported the allies during World War II.  Then it had a couple of bloody civil wars.  It does, at least, seem to be doing OK at the moment.

So let’s talk food.  Unsurprisingly, Liberian food is a mix of colonial influences from America and local ingredients and customs. Meat and fish are more common than in some other parts of Africa, and the stew we ended up making used quite a bit of it.

All of our recipes today come from a Liberian recipe site on the Internet Archive, via United Noshes.

But first, shopping!  In particular, we needed some esoteric leaves, so it was back to the African grocery store I first visited for our Ghanaian meal. The same clerk was working there, and was just as puzzled as last time at the extremely caucasian person asking for extremely African ingredients.  But she was also super nice, just like last time, and as soon as I mentioned what we were doing, she remembered me from last time.

And with that, I had acquired two bags of leaves, and she threw in some plantains for free.

First bag of leaves:  Sweet Potato greens!  Once defrosted, these bear a striking resemblance to chopped spinach:

They don’t NOT taste like spinach, either.  But these greens form the base of a very hearty stew.  HOW hearty, you ask?  Here’s the bowl of meat:

That’s shrimp, beef, AND chicken. Not pictured: the smoked turkey ALSO called for by the recipe.  Annoyingly, the recipe calls for all the meat to be placed in a bowl, tossed with corn starch and seasoning, then sorted back out and fried separately to get the cooking time for each correct.  Next time, I’m just dividing the seasoning up and seasoning each pile one at a time.

OK, all the meat’s cooked – now what?

The recipe has a set of prepration steps involved in using fresh greens, all of which we skipped, because we only had frozen.  Next, you cook the greens for a LONG time with some onion.

Once that’s done, you toss in the cooked meat (which has now been sitting for 40 minutes – the sequencing on this recipe leaves something to be desired) and cook until warmed through, and you’re done!

This is a LOT of stew, but I wanted to use the entire bag of greens, so I halved the recipe to match the amount of greens.  That’s right – the full recipe calls for TWICE AS MUCH of this, and can clearly feed 8 or more people.

Observant readers will notice that I mentioned TWO bags of leaves.  That’s because the other dish we’re making is a Liberian rice dish called “check rice” or “chuck rice,” depending on the source.

This was… an interesting one.  If you look for pictures of this stuff online, it’s a rice dish with a beautiful light green color, and little flecks of greenery in among the pile of fluffy rice.  Ours… did not turn out like that.

The key ingredient in this dish is jute leaf, which last encountered in our meal from Chad. At the time, we quite liked it, but the bag we bought then was substantially different than the one we used here, not at the least because this time the bag we got was considerably larger, and shredded considerably finer.

Even the lady at the African grocer was at pains to make sure we understood JUST how gloopy these things are.

They are VERY gloopy.  United Noshes describes them as “astonishingly mucilaginous.” Like with the sweet potato leaves, one suspects they are VERY different fresh. But we did our best to cook them up with some parboiled rice.  Lovely and light green, this turned out not to be.

I’m pretty sure we did something SERIOUSLY wrong, but I’m not sure what.  It would be very interesting to try it again with the other bag of leaves.  At any rate – here’s dinner!

The flavors were great. What’s not to like about a big pile of assorted meat and fish with greens?  The sweet potato greens tasted like a milder counterpart to spinach.  The rice TASTED good.

But – everything was very gloopy.  The rice, in particular, was gloop personified.  The stew was good, but I couldn’t help but wish we’d been able to make it with fresh leaves, or even frozen whole ones.

As always, when a dish in this project isn’t to our taste, we want to stress that that’s never the fault of the dish – it’s either a) we executed it poorly, or b) our palates just aren’t accustomed to the beloved cuisines of other countries.

In this case, it’s probably a bit of both – we didn’t know what we were doing, we used low quality frozen ingredients, and we’re just not used to these textures.  I would definitely LOVE to try these dishes prepared with fresh ingredients by someone who knows what they are doing.

Something we don’t always talk about on this blog is leftovers.  There are often leftovers, because we don’t know enough about how to scale these recipes, or because we don’t want to have too much of an unusual ingredient left over and taking up pantry or fridge space.  (Despite that motivation, our pantry and fridge are, unsurprisingly, full of ingredients I can’t even remember how they got there.  What the hell is sand ginger, anyway?)

But just for fun, here’s some ways to use leftover Liberian sweet potato leaf stew:

1. Served over a big pile of regular white rice.  This worked really well – trying to soak up moist leaves with rice that was not ITSELF full of moist leaves worked much better.

2. In a tortilla with cheese and salsa.  Possibly blasphemous, but delicious.

3. Mixed into a cream cheese and mozzella dip, a la spinach and artichoke dip.  But with meat, and no spinach or artichokes.  We’re definitely going to hell for this one, but it sure was good!

One more African country in this stretch – next up, Libya!

Recipes:
Sweet Potato Greens
Check Rice

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