food to glow

By the looks of these images you can probably tell I have been sitting on this awhile. No sparse concrete background to set off the dish, just a narrow floor tile and a crumpled piece of paper. But regardless of the dubious aesthetic I really wanted to share this recipe.

I was motivated to make this colourful, one-pot dish by my unending desire for Middle Eastern food. This is despite getting a really rather awful case of food poisoning in the mid-80s from a late-night (early morning) visit to an anonymous Edinburgh takeaway. I’ll explain.

It was one of those places with a column of pallid, pre-formed “lamb” turning slowly on a vertical spit in an open window, and a bleary eyed guy on standby to satiate the drunken students with cheap, meaty wraps and bottles of Irn Bru. With only the slightest contempt for his braying customers he would slather flatbreads with yogurt sauce, stud them with salad (quite revolutionary in 80s Edinburgh), and then shave some of this mystery meat on top to make a döner kebab or a shawarma – the name depending on what nationality was making your sly meal. A squirt of spicy red sauce pulled it all together.

Well, at 2 am with a belly full of beer and not much else, this always seems a good idea. At least when you are 19. There was always a queue at this place, so that was a good sign, right? But my happiness at having a warm, unexpected meal on a sharply cold February night was short-loved. I spent the next few days doing what one does when afflicted with proper food poisoning. I really thought I was going to die. It took a full week to recover, and many years before I ate anything vaguely Turkish or Middle Eastern again.

Now of course Middle Eastern and Turkish food in the UK is much elevated. You can still get a dubious shawarma, but more likely you will see restaurants with menus full of authentic homestyle and street food dishes. The chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have done much to rehabilitate the reputation of Middle Eastern cooking in the UK, and their influence has spread to the US and beyond.

Middle Eastern ingredients are also pretty easy to get now, so that if one has even the slightest hankering for an authentic couscous dish then the supermarket rather than online is usually the place to go for the proper ingredients. I am writing as someone living in a city, and a rather food-centric one at that, so I apologise if you aren’t easily able to get a jar of preserved lemons or harissa, let alone sumac or Aleppo pepper. I can help you out with the preserved lemons and the harissa, but so far growing sumac and these special Syrian, fruity-tart peppers eludes me. 🙂

Which leads me back to today’s recipe. This is a comforting one-pot meal that is easy enough to make during the week, and will be even better as leftovers. I like to use rather humble and commonplace base ingredients in many homey recipes, but have tried to elevate them in this instance by simmering in a mildly-spiced, shawarma-ish sauce. Obviously it is not a shawarma as this denotes spiced meat, but for my aromatic vegan recipe I slathered veg in a sauce combining commonly used shawarma lamb spices with a hint of the unique tomato sauce that accompanies the spiced lamb in stuffed flatbreads. We really liked this rather delicious sauce, and it is absolutely perfect for firm, seasonal vegetables.  Think tangy, exotic, tomatoey goodness. I used sweet potato and cauliflower, but you could easily use kohlrabi, carrots, a winter squash, parsnips, swede, salsify – anything of this rooty, autumnal sort.

I wish I could go and properly research shawarma for myself. But for now my food will have to be my journey.

The list of countries where I have a serious case of food love is ever-growing. So much so that I may need to get another job to fulfil my ambition of eating it all authentically. What country’s or regions’s food do you love that you have never experienced in the country itself? What would be your ‘dream dish’ to eat if you went?

Food To Glow uses the Froothie Optimum 9400 blender and the Froothie Optimum 600 slow juicer to make juices, nut milks, sauces, desserts, soups and smoothies (and more!). These are affiliate links, meaning if you buy a blender or juicer through them I will earn a small commission but you will pay no additional money. This is not a paid post and all thoughts and opinions are, as always, my own.