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Because you love food from the Mediterranean. From the east to the west, from Palermo to Beirut. Because you need uncomplicated recipes full of flavour in your life, original, authentic and modern at the same time. And no life without lemon, olive oil, onion and garlic. I hope you will feel at home here in Café Mazahar’s COOKING THE MED.
Two years ago i started a new food life. It was in january by chance….and I badly badly needed the change. I wrote about my low/lower carb journey due to hormonal changes before and it gave me a whole new way of looking at my food. You will wonder, and so did i, how on earth can you do this in a (professional) life full of food? Surely not easy, but do able. So if you are on the same page, don’t despair!
The secret for me is too not skip everything but taking little bites of only the tastiest carbs ( i still take a bite of a really nice cake but not of an average cookie!) and substitute with extremely tasty other things. The perfect excuse to become a quirky food snob: only the best is good enough for us. Plus you will eat way more veg (I look at them from a different angle now: of course they are perfect subs for carbs and not only the cauliflower rice), nuts and seeds and stuff like this: low carb crackers. I made a lot of these, mainly the ones that became popular, the seedy crackers with soaked linseed. But two things were annoying me: they are fragile and they lack what should be their most important talent: crispiness. Crackers of course need to crack under your teeth. A kind of dry crispiness if you get what i mean. I want to enjoy them nice and crispy on their own and i want them to transport dips, cheeses both with their texture and taste.
Like these: my flour seed crackers from one of my previous books, they are fantastic and certainly one of the reasons i got to the point of (no) return. Easy to eat too many….
styling Maaike Koorman, photograpy Saskia van Osnabrugge, Cafe Mazahar
CHICKPEA FLOUR
The solution for something just as good: my eye fell on a kind of chickpea crackers. And since i’m still in a chickpea flour period, i thought that’s my fix. Because in a cracker, you need something powdery (like flour), which you lack in seed crackers. Real flour is great but carby and since we don’t really need the gluten, chickpea flour is just as fine. It has less carbs and more protein. Yalla i say. And they are sturdy enough and crispy at the same time and with a nice nutty flavour.
And so there is my true crispy low carb cracker successor and i’m planning to bake these often. To have a big batch ready whenever their is an aperitivo moment and i want to snack like anybody else. Any delicious. sourdough or fococcia laying around won’t seduce me anymore. Another good thing about these crackers below is they fill you up quickly, because of the protein, making sure you will not overeat. I added a substantial amount of sesame seed, to give them a nutty structure and to lower again the carbs, plus some dried za’atar leaves, or oregano as you wish.
Some whipped up feta blackened by kalamata olives, with fresh coriander and pistachio was the perfect dip to go with it. And it all takes few minutes, now how good is that.
So here we go:
NEW YEAR CHICKPEA SESAME CRACKER WITH ZA’ATAR WITH A HERBY BLACK FETA DIP
serves 4-6
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