Blog of The Week

Blog Day 2005 was a huge success. Up until the day of the event 18,400 blogs mentioned Blog Day. The concept certainly encouraged me to explore blogs outside of my realm. I'd like to continue the spirit of that day by having a blog of the week on both of my blogs. For this blog I will focus on Maghrebi, African, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean bloggers and compare a traditional dish from the country the blogger is from with an Algerian dish.

I am very new to blogging. I started in mid-July, before that I posted alot about Algerian and French cuisine on English language food forums. I kept wondering where the other North Africans were. There were just a handful of Middle Eastern posters. We seemed to be under represented as is the case in most English language media.

As soon as I started blogging the world of bloggers from North Africa and the Middle East opened up to me, many quickly found me which never happened on the forums. The network is vast and the blogs form a sort of oral narrative. I've written about the importance of oral narrative in Arabic literature before. The Maghrebis tend to blog in French and of course Arabic. The Middle Eastern bloggers tend to write in English and of course Arabic.

So the larger media does not give a platform for our voices. We create our own through blogging. I hope to introduce you to a wide range of voices and faces, many I do not agree with, many I do. They all have some things in common. They are smart, sharp, make historical references, have an ironic and satirical sense of humour, talk of love, loss and pain, offer advice, a will, an aim or a plan. And yes there is politics. In short they offer their RAI.

My choice for this week's blogger is Haitham of Sabbah's Blog. . You can read more about him  here.  He was born in Kuwait, has Jordanian citizenship and is of Palestinian origin.

I present a Palestinian dish that is exactly the same as an Algerian dish.

Bob May is a missionary. He documented his experiences in Palestine through photographs and journalistic pieces of writing. He has kindly let me reproduce a roast chicken preparation he documented. The earth and rock oven is exactly like one I saw in Algeria and the preparation is  identical.

From Bob May's website

(1) Build an earth oven out of old rocks, clay, and straw. Make it large enough for eight chickens. (Abu Iyad completed this step a couple of years ago.)

(2) Build a pretty good fire in it.

Abu Iyad is careful to avoid the flames

3) Rest and let the fire burn down to scorching coals. No flames should be present.

 
Hydrate. It's hot as heck around that oven.

4) Select bird and perform necessary preparation procedures-- or get some at the market.

These look good enough to eat, but we opted for the market chicken.

(5) Mix clay, straw and water to make mud. The mud will be used to seal the oven exhaust and door.

Half a bucket of mud should be enough.

(6) Load the oven with spiced chicken, potatoes, onions, eggplant, tomatoes, etc

Toss the food onto the grill rack in the oven. This is about as close as you can get. It's hot as heck around that oven.

7) Place a large flat stone over oven door. Place plate over oven exhaust. Seal edges with mud.

Pat mud over areas where smoke escapes.

8) Wait. Sit under an olive tree and wait one hour. Learn to count to ten in Arabic. Talk about the prophets. Realize that you have forgotten to put the potatoes inside.

Hang out with the guys.

Notice that more boys show up the closer you get to finishing the job.

9) Break the seal and drop the door. The mud will have hardened, so it will take a bit of muscle.

Drop the door and stand back. It's hot as heck around that oven.

(10) Grab food! It should smell fantastic.

Use a skewer or something to get your food, because the oven is very hot.

11) Enjoy! Stuff yourself and forget about meals for two days.

Iyad didn't have any complaints.

 

Algeria Algerian Cuisine Algerian Recipes Algerian Food Algerian dishes Cuisine Algerienne Recettes Algerienne North African cuisine Maghreb Cuisine

Comments

[Farid Zadi]

Hi Oliver and Michael,

Yes, the chicken is delicious prepared this way. When I have the space I will do a tutorial of building one and cooking chickens in it.

It tastes of all the goodness the earth gives and fire and smoke.

[Oliver]

Hi Farid,
What a great oven! To spite technology, I can easily imagine that the most delicious, authentic dishes have their origin in those type ovens and taste much better than the attempts using high-tech gadgets...

Great blog of yours!! Keep up the wondeful work-

[Michael R]

What a wonderful post. I do research on different countries and their cuisines. There really is not much information about Palestinian cookery. It goes back into Ancient history, yet there is very little information in English on it.