Keeping up with my brand and my blog, I am mixing things up and posting things late.
Last week we celebrated the start of a great initiative started by two awesome ladies, Nadia and Mai. We celebrated on April 2nd, along with all the participants by hosting a gathering with my foodie friends at a local restaurant that I LOVE for its food, atmosphere, and simple feel.

The initiative is called April Is For Arab Food, and it is to celebrate our heritage recipes and bring exposure to it. To me, most importantly, this is so important in the west where our food is being appropriated and promoted as Israeli food. I live online and I SEE!
My friend, blogger and cookbook author, Bethany Kehdy said it best in her book and shared it on instagram. I could not have said it any better

I am happy to be part of this and I will be sharing recipes and photos according to our weekly themes (late one this week) to give you a closer look at what our food is and how alive the markets are.

The first week’s theme was Mahashi; Stuffed Food. We are known for the various types of produce and we actually stuff a lot of them in one way or another.

Away from the stuffed produce that a lot of my fellow bloggers have shared on their platforms, I’ve decided to go a bit more gore and follow-up with the behind-the-scenes photo I’ve shared from the Saida market of intestines and stomachs being primarily cleaned with running water on the floor inside a butcher shop. To which I’d like to clarify, this is the first clean-up and those are cleaned so many times before they hit the food prep. Read the recipe below to get it.

In Arabic, intestines for food use are called Fweregh (feregh for singular, Arabic for Empty), and the stomachs are named the same way we call bellies on people; Keresh (Kroush for plural). There are several parts of the Keresh used for stuffing. One looks fuzzy and the other is with a honeycomb pattern (both pictured) and one is like a wide tube and another is just thin fat film casing that traditionally used by some to wrap kebab or kafta meat fingers and cooked where the fat melts and keeps the meat moist.

This is not a dish I eat myself, despite being exposed to this from an early age, being the son of a butcher and accompanying my dad sometimes when he’s slaughtering an animal. But I thought this is a recipe to be documented and shared for those who like it, or those who don’t know it. So vegan and vegetarian friends, I’m sorry for this!

The recipe is called Ghammé, which in Arabic can translate to a gloomy overwhelming feeling, commonly accompanying sorrow and melancholy. Don’t ask me about the origin of the name. Once I know, I’ll share it right away. But this dish is highly praised, mainly for its rarity. It is a time and effort consuming recipe, and this is why few people make it. Even when they make it, they have to know how to make it well. It is quite tricky to get it right. But here is mom’s recipe for making this glorious offal dish in the best way possible.

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NOTE

• As per mom’s recommendation, lamb is used for this recipe because the same parts coming from cows are very thick and tough