This will not be a blog about cooking machboos.
I’ve already written about machboos, and I did not much change the recipe from when I made it for Qatar last August. The only real change I made was to use chicken thighs, which somehow made an excellent dish even better.
I’ve had a bear of a cold the last couple of days, one of those knock-you-on-your-cheeks deals that left me generally interested in one thing: sitting on the couch, drinking tea.
It’s been fun to expand my spice collection – and to use what I have.
We’re all guilty of spice hoarding. Deep in the back of your spice cabinet is something you don’t use – cloves, mace, in my case, cinnamon. And then there’s the stuff you see at specialty markets, thinking you’ll find a day when you need that exotic-named, richly-colored powder you’d never heard of before.
After spending two weeks in Europe, it was back to the grindstone – with another trip to the Muslim world.
This time, I was cooking Nihari, a national dish of Pakistan, and a contrast from the rice-and-meat heavy influence of most of the Middle East. Hell, in the U.S., we’d call this fusion cuisine – a mix of Indian and Middle Eastern influences.
I can’t imagine going dawn-to-dusk without a morsel. My respect for those who do is immense.
Nation Plates 