O. Oh no. Omani again!
Wait, wait, let me explain:
Did you know there is only ONE country starting with O on the face of the earth??
So during the first, restaurant-based cycle of this culinary pursuit, Dorottya and Bernhard already had Omani food, and as they couldn’t find any Omani restaurants in London, Dorottya cooked Omani at home (I wonder if that’s still the case or if someone has picked up the gauntlet and filled this gap in London’s culinary scene?).
Not wanting to repeat herself, she asked Bernhard to take up O this time round – which sent my man into a merry frenzy of research, experimentation, and shopping.
After much umming and ahhing, comparing, picking, and then discarding recipes (as too challenging, too heavy, or miss-matching), Bernhard decided on the following menu:
Starter: home-made flatbread, served with tahini dip, schoog (a shatta-chilli paste from the Arab peninsula and north-African – not for the faint of heart), toasted pistachios and cracked olives.
Main: Mishkak – beef shashlik marinated in pureed papaya and spices, and Kabuli rice – a spiced pilaf-type dish with sultanas, almonds and pistachios.
For dessert we took a shameful shortcut, and bought excellent pastries from a couple of Persian bakeries in north-Finchley.
Speaking of which: what a fantastic bazaar Ballards Lane, N12 / N3 is!
I’ve recently moved to that area from east Finchley – reducing the size of my home, but completely upgrading my culinary shopping scene: North Finchley has a very diverse community; with people from Iran, Greece, Turkey, as well as Pakistan, Japan and Jamaica … it boasts a magnificent panoply of eateries and shops bringing to north London ingredients and flavours of all these amazing cuisines.
So out Bernhard and I went, filling our shopping bags with armfuls of spices, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, pastes, teas, and herbs, as well as Halal beef, veg and fruit.
Next came experimenting: as neither of us had ever made flatbread before, Bernhard wanted to try it out – so I dutifully served as his guinea-pig.
The recipe is super simple: just plain white flour, water, and a bit of salt, and the instructions were ‘to find the level of wetness which suits you’. After a few attempts to get the consistency right Bernhard reached a batter and frying time which gave a flexible, fluffy lafa, perfect for scooping dips.
On the day of the dinner Bernhad made the Mishkak and Kabuli rice (having marinated the meat the night before). I arrived early to help.
We both felt a veg dish was needed, but couldn’t find an Omani veg recipe. So I went a bit rogue: I quartered (lengthways) two beautiful, large aubergines in their skin, covered with Harissa paste and some chopped garlic and put them in a preheated oven for about an hour.
Originally my intention was to serve these aubergine boats as they were, but the flesh became so soft, I ended up scooping it out of the skin and serving as a sort of warm salad – which went very well with the meat and flatbread.
Dorottya, Lianne and Idit arrived on cue, and Bernhard griddled the Mishkak (meat skewers) while we tucked in to the starters.
The scents wafting around the apartment were intoxicating.
The marinated meat was juicy and flavorful, and the Kabuli rice was incredibly aromatic and salty-sweet with it’s almonds, sultanas, and many, many spices.
Alcohol not being big in the muslim country, we acompanied the food with Laban – a salty buttermilk drink (I used Ayran from the Turkish corner shop) flavoured with cardamom and crushed pistachios. It wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but I found it very refreshing and a great balance to all the spice-induced heat this meal generated.
For dessert we served the delicious pastries: some of kataifi, others of puff-pastry, with honey, almonds, pistachios, apricots, and rosewater, accompanied with amazing saffron and rose-petal tea.
The tea we’d bought at the bakery as an after-thought – and how glad we were that we did! It went amazingly well with the rich pastries.
It was great to have these two dinners – Norway and Omani – is such quick succession; I think we all felt a sense of urgency to get together again soon, before something else foiled us – after those long months of lockdown and social distancing.
The next Letter – P – is mine, and I’m deliberating between Portugal – a cuisine I’m pretty familiar with and which poses no great challenge in finding ingredients for – and something far more exotic: Papua New Guinea. Guess which I ended up choosing 😉
