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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Ghammé; Fweregh & Kroush
Serves 3-4 persons
Fweregh
Ingredients
1 lamb intestine
2 cup rice
200g ground beef
Allspice
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Salt
2tbsp Vegetable oil (more for sautéing)
Aromatics for the broth; onion, cinnamon, bay leaf
Procedure
Ask your butcher to clean the intestines before you buy them. Still, you have to do some cleaning yourself
First, use the back of your knife to scrape off most of the fat on the outer layer.
Wash the outside and insert one end in the water faucet and rinse from the inside and help by squeezing with your hand to get most of the mucus material from the inside. If you can’t do this with your faucet, use a funnel
Use a sprinkle of nutmeg and a few drops of rose water to get rid of the smell
Prepare the filling and get ready to start stuffing
Hold the tube with one hand and curl the opening towards the inside, the opposite of how you’d open a pastry bag. This will ensure the filling is touching the clean side and turning the intestine inside out to clean afterwards
Fill it until it is flipped entirely. Tie the ends with a butcher’s twine or a regular thread
Wash and sprinkle with more nutmeg and rosewater
To cook, heat a. pan with some olive oil and brown the sides then cover with hot water with aromatics like cinnamon stick, bay leaves, and a quartered onion and season with salt. Once it boils, lower the heat and simmer for an hour until the filling is cooked through
Kroush
Ingredients
1 lamb stomach
2 cup rice
200g ground beef
1 cup boiled chickpea (or canned and drained)
1 large onion, thinly sliced
Allspice
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Salt
2tbsp Vegetable oil
Aromatics for the broth; onion, cinnamon, bay leaf
Procedure
The stomachs should also be cleaned by the butcher as they have a dark pigment covering them. It can be cleaned at home by dipping them in hot water then scraping
Wash it well, inside out then sprinkle some nutmeg and a few drops of rosewater to eliminate the bad smell
Now with a knife or kitchen scissors, cut the stomach into 10 cm, or to the size you like. You’ll be sewing them into pouches and stuffing them
Grab each pouch and sew three sides and set aside
Prepare the stuffing by mixing all the ingredients
Grab each pouch and with the one open side, scoop in enough stuffing without over-filling it
Sew the 4th side and repeat with the rest of the pouches
In a pot, arrange the pouches and cover with enough hot water to go over them by a centimeter or two
Add some aromatics like cinnamon stick, bay leaves, and a quartered onion and season with salt
Once it boils, lower the heat and simmer covered for around 2 hours until it’s all cooked well
NOTE
As per mom’s recommendation, lamb is used for this recipe because the same parts coming from cows are very thick and tough
Cook in Five Square Meters 