*Taps Music Stand*

*Signals to Chorus*

“MAAAAAAAAA-DAGASCAR Where The Lemurs Come Roaring Off The Plains!”

ahem.

That is probably not how that goes.  I don’t think lemurs can roar.

But they are strictly confined to the island of Madagascar.  When Leigh and I were first dating, over twenty years ago (twenty…? Jesus Christ…), we somehow managed to gift each other not one but TWO stuffed lemurs, which we still have to this very day.  Their names are Chocolate and Vanilla.

Oddly, despite the fact that the island is known for it, we managed not to include any actual vanilla in this meal.  Then again, we didn’t include any lemur either, so there you are.

We should really get on with this.  There are 17 “M” countries, so there’s no time to waste.

So what are we actually making?  The most plausible candidate for a national dish of Magadascar as far as I can tell is Romazava, a dish of zebu meat containing anamalaho greens.  Neither of which are we going to be able to acquire, so that’s off to a good start!

Zebu is at least just a type of cattle, so we’ll be fine there just using beef.  Anamalaho, on the other hand, is sort of key, since it imparts a numbing spice similar to Sichuan pepper.  Given that we’re not going to be getting that either, we used dandilion greens, on the theory that they would give a somewhat peppery flavor.  In addition, we mixed in spinach and watercress, as suggested by our recipe source.

Past that, it’s a pretty standard beef stew. We do, of course, begin by chopping and sauteeing an onoin.  It’s the law.  Here is stock onion frying photo #34591:

You then brown the beef for a bit with the onions, then toss in a mix of ginger, garlic, green chili, tomatoes, salt, and pepper.  Simmer for a while, then add water, and let it braise with the greens for an hour.

Bim bam, easy.  What about a side dish?  We give you Lasary Voatabia – the world’s least complicated salad.  Tomatoes, scallions, salt, and hot sauce of your choice.

Gotta remember this one – it is ludicrously easy and really good.

And here’s our meal, along with a pile of basmati rice for serving.  (Apparently rice with EVERYTHING is the norm in Madagascar.)

Doesn’t that look tasty?  Unlike a number of the other African stews we’ve made where we committed to using the RIGHT leaves, at the expense of dealing with them frozen, here we used fresh leaves.  This may not have been perfectly authentic, but oh my goodness – the improvement in texture is SO worth it.

And this meal was great!  The stew was well seasoned, the peppery greens had lots of personality, even after the long cook time, and hotsauce tomatoes were a great side.  We don’t do a lot of these meals on weeknights, but this one posed no difficulties at all.

Next up, Malawi!

Recipes:
Romazava
Lasary Voatabia

At Yale, there’s a saying: “Your Veritas sucks if you ain’t got no Lux.”  I could explain that, but it’s not worth the effort, really.

I think a BETTER saying for today’s post would be “Your Benelux sucks if you ain’t got no Lux,” since it refers to the subject of today’s meal – Luxembourg!  We both think we’ve PROBABLY been there, but we’re not certain.  It would have been something like 20-30 years ago if we have.

Luxembourg is a big country by small country standards, with over 15 times the total area of Liechtenstein.  But it’s a small country by Big Country standards, having never achieved a #17 hit on the UK pop charts with a song named “Luxembourg.”

For this meal, we are making the acknowledged national dish of Luxembourg, Judd mat Gaardebounen, or smoked pork collar with fava beans.  So to start with, we had to go shopping for the two key ingredients.

Smoked pork collar I found at a local eastern European butcher.  This kind of smoked meat is quite salty, so it’s necessary to soak for a long time to remove some of the brine.

Weirdly, one of the recipes I found for this says you can smoke a pork neck yourself by putting it on a rack in a dutch oven, putting rice and herbs under it, and heating the pot until the herbs start smoking.

This strikes me as nonsense, and the pictures of their results would seem to confirm it.  The fully “smoked” pork in their recipe looked grey, rather than ham-colored pink like ours did.

At any rate, the actual cooking process once you’ve soaked your pork is pretty straightforward – you just boil it for several hours along with a bunch of aromatics like carrots and leeks.  There IS an onion in this recipe, as per usual, but in this case it only gets chopped in half and has a few cloves stuck in it.

Which leaves us to talk about the much more labor intensive part of this recipe – the fava beans.  While on my shopping trip, I picked up a bag of dried fava beans, but then to my great surprise, the next store I walked into had them fresh.  In Canada, in February.  Definitely not what I was expecting.

We’ve never cooked with these things before, and they are kind of monsters. They look like this when you first get them.

Those have to be shelled, and the inner beans look like this.

Those beans have to be blanched, i.e., tossed in boiling water for a few minutes, and then dropped in ice water to stop cooking.

And then…. you have to peel them some MORE!

The final peeled, blanched beans have a lovely green color (mostly) and a taste that’s like a lima bean but a bit milder.  These are prepared with a velouté sauce.

Wait… a velouté sauce?  Is this… is this FRENCH cooking?  Oh dear.  OK, let’s figure this out.

First, you make a roux with flour and butter.  Different recipes disagreed on the color of the roux, and the associated cooking time.  We went with about 10 minutes of constant stirring and a medium blonde color.

Next, you go in with stock (from the pork) and wine. Now, our local liquor store din’t have any Luxembourg wine, but we did find a Riesling from very nearby. (Nearby to Luxembourg, not nearby to the liquor store.)  Neither Leigh or I were terribly familiar with Rieslings, but we were a bit taken aback by the Wikipedia subsection: “Petroleum notes in aged Riesling wines“.

We didn’t detect any petroleum ourselves, fortunately.

Once the sauce has thickened, you toss in the beans and your seasoning.  The recipe calls for fresh savory, and we subbed that (as suggested) with sage and thyme.  However, we forgot to reduce the quantity for dried, rather than fresh herbs, so it took on a bit of a grey cast.  It didn’t TASTE overseasoned, but it looked somewhat weird.

Finally, we parboiled some new potatoes, fried them in oil, and then let them soak up some more of the stock.

And here’s our final spread.

Not bad, right?  The pork is the healthy pink color it’s supposed to be, and was still a nice chewy texture.  The beans were OK by themselves, but great scooped onto a bite of pork.  And finally, what’s not to like about fried potatoes in pork stock?  We drank the rest of the wine, and it was a nice accompaniment.

So that’s Luxembourg! I’d make the pork part again, although I’m not sure fava beans are worth the effort.  Next up, the “M” countries, starting with Madagascar.  And there are a LOT of M countries, so we’ll be here a while.

Recipe:
Judd mat Gaardebounen

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 POTATOES.

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, Liechtenstein, 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 Liechtenstein, located high in the Alps between Switzerland and Austria.

Two fun facts about Liechtenstein:
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 ballpark.  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 tangyness into the mixture would be to use French “fromage blanc.”

This stuff’s pretty good – it basically tastes like mild sour cream, with a texture closer to cream cheese.  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, onions 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 trivial 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