I?? – you ask – What about H? Well, dear reader, we fudged the order a bit with these next few dinners: Dorottya wanted to do a traditional outdoor Goulash cookout for H – Hungarian (her home country) – so in a daring move we decided to push that forward to await warmer weather, and do I and J in the meantime.
So, on 3 Feb 2020 – I, and Israel: my neurotic yet beloved motherland.
Assembled friends: Bernhard & myself, Dorottya, Lianne, and I also invited Idit, a close friend of mine and fellow Isareli expat, with her local hubby, Oliver (They too became a permanent part of our little dinner club, later on).
Soundtrack: A playlist compiled by KAN 88 Radio on Spotify, of alternative Istaeli albums. Awesome.
Originally I planned to cook a Jerusalem mixed grill, but in the end I made a Tchulnt – a slow-cooked, one-pot meal, a staple of Jewish Saturday family dinners.
Now, Israeli food is quite popular around the US and UK these days, but it is very young – still forming, really. It feeds off the mixed rich traditions Jewish immigrants brought with them from north Africa and the Arab Peninsula (Mizrahi), and from eastern Europe (Ashkenasi), mixed up with the rich local Palestinian cuisine.
My grandparents came from eastern Europe, but the recipe I used was the Chamin taught to me (only once I was married!) by my much-missed Kurdistani nanny – so a true embodiment of east & west fusion. Her recipe is very labour-intensive, so I simplified it somewhat: she used to flatten beef-shoulder cuts, stuff them & sew them up; I don’t go as far as that.
I usually use oxtail on the bone, but this time I could’t find any, so used another long-cook beef cut, with no bone.
I should have looked hader: though most of the Tchulnt / Chamin was sumptuous, the meat turned out hard & dry after 6 hours in the oven. My mistake was not searing it properly before adding the other ingredients, and then adding cold instead of boiling water (a begginer’s mistake for which I was scolded by Rutti, my nanny’s daughter, when I called her I later to moan of my inedible meat).
However, the marbled eggs (huevos haminados, in the 1st pic) turned out beautiful, and the beans and potatoes, cooked for hours in the meat juices & plenty of spices, were delicious & plentiful.
For dessert I made an Israeli children’s favourite: Layered biscuit & cream cake (or poor-man’s Tiramisu), which made Idit squeak with joy, and Dorottya & Lianne brought an excellent Israeli red wine.
