On my way home Friday, I stopped by Whole Foods to pick up a few things for our cooking adventure this weekend. I remembered how much lamb to buy, but the bulgur? I bought 1 1/2 lbs from the bulk bins. Good thing we like it, since we only needed about a half cup.
Here’s the bulgur after a stint in the microwave:
While waiting for the bulgur (bulgar? bulger? burghul?) to cool, I quartered some carrots and tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper:
Those cooked for about 20 minutes and could have gone a little longer, but they were still just fine and dandy. After roasting, they were tossed with my version of za’atar. That blend of spices calls for sumac, but we were plumb out as in I have no idea where to get some, but will be on the look out. Really, I think those carrots could easily just be salted and peppered again after roasting and they’d still be lovely.
OK, so here are all the main ingredients:
And, you’ll notice in the above picture that the mint and onion aren’t shown. I think those were being pulsed in the blender when I took this picture. You’ll also probably notice, if you’ve figured out what this dish is, that there’s something critical missing. The recipe we found on the intertubes left out pine nuts. Seriously? So we tossed a half cup on for toasting and then they were thrown in the blender with the onion and mint. A nice gooey paste came out of the blender and went into the bulgur.
As the better-half was mixing the ingredients with his hands, he said, “grab some more pine nuts”. I guess another 1/4 cup went into the dish. Those remained whole and untoasted.
The raw:
And, the cooked*:
Yep, that’s kibbeh folks. We love kibbeh and talk about it probably more than we should. Now, we know a basic recipe–which I will be rewriting because who leaves out the pine nuts?
*I crack myself up.
Updated 2/13/11: we had dinner the other night at The Phoenician which is a Lebanese place over on Broad. We ordered kibbeh as an appetizer. Theirs must be a mix of beef and lamb because while ours were delicious, they were a bit strong (think multiple Tums). In the future we’ll be mixing the meats because the restaurant’s were smoother in flavor and there was no backtalking.