welcome to COOKING THE MED
You are here with me Merijn Tol, food writer, cookbook author and cook from Amsterdam, but my heart is beating for the Med. If you too love food from the Mediterranean, from east to west from Palermo to Beirut, you came to the right place! Be at home in Café Mazahar’s COOKING THE MED. I serve you my Mediterranean recipes with a twist.
Cafe Mazahar is the name of one of my latest cookbooks, and my travelling popup.
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Yalla let’s go to this week’s recipe….
image credit Magdalena Olszewska
It was in Lebanon my love for fresh coriander reached a new state of of mind. I had always known it as a fresh herb, with a pungent aromatic flavour and smell. Some people don’t like it because the taste to them is soapy. Mouths differ in our perception of flavour. Not to me tough. I really loved it. But i had never had it cooked only raw. In Lebanon it was common to stir fry it with some garlic, used in many Lebanese dishes (like molokhia for instance, a dish with a specific green veg called that way, chicken and rice). And the whole idea of coriander i had previously - kesbora - in Lebanese, turned upside down. I remember one time in the kitchen of my friend Nathalie, while preparing her mum’s molokhia (the best!) she brought in a huge bag with maybe 3-4 big plump bunches of the fresh herb. My goodness i thought, are we going to use this ALL?
And yes so we did. We chopped the whole shebang, and in it went, stir fried with liberal amounts of garlic and mixed in with a bit of broth and lemon juice. The whole flavour profile changed in 1 sec: it became a very aromatic vegetable, a bit like stir fried spinach, but without the earthyness, just very light, woody and citrussy. Loved it!
I was hooked: stir fried coriander with lots of garlic hell yes! I put it on labneh as you can see here in this picture from my book Beiroet paired with some dill too (btw i should do another newsletter on stir fried dill)
Image credit Tanya Traboulsi photography, styling Maaike Koorman
It remains still one of my favorite ways to eat it: on top of some goat labneh (or Greek yoghurt if you wish). You can see that here too.
And so it happened that coriander (or cilantro for some of you) was never the same again for me. And i believe you should try it too if you don’t know it like this. Just buy a big fat bunch of coriander (not in the supermarket obviously, those we call sprigs) chop it up really coarsely, fry some chopped garlic and add the coriander, stir fry until just wilted and a bit of salt. Add it to some stir fried spinach, on top of a fried egg, labneh, you name it.
And that’s just one of the surprising aromatics in this quick fresh pasta with saffron, lots of garlic, tomato, coriander and……a zingy preserved lemon oil.
SAFFRON PASTA WITH TOMATO, CORIANDER, GARLIC AND PRESERVED LEMON OIL
serves 4
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