Onion and tomato couscous

At least I got to use my cool Moroccan plate-when otherwise?

I got beyond my expectations and managed to squeeze in one more post for October! Go, me. Shame the result was iffy.
A friend who also uses the Jerusalem cookbook had been recommending this recipe. I assumed it would be pretty straightforward, in spite of never have been much of a couscous maker. As a home dish, in my mind it's mainly a carbo-rich side dish. So this was my first real attempt to make "something" out of couscous. I think in this case, I really overdid my tendency to skip or replace ingredients (BUY TOMATO PUREE!!).

So this is what I did:

100 grs quick-made couscous (yes, I used that. Tar and feather me).
1 onion, thinly sliced.
2 diced tomatoes
Olive oil
Butter
salt&pepper

Heat up the onion with olive oil in a skillet (you're supposed to put in tomato puree as well). Add the tomatoes, salt, and pepper, cook for about 3 mins.
Boil the couscous for 1 min. (You're supposed to pour boiling stock over it. Needless to say, I didn't have stock, let alone the "good quality" one that the recipe recommends).
Pour tomato and onion sauce on the couscous, set aside (oops, I forgot to cool the couscous down).
Clean up the skillet, melt butter and oil. Add couscous and sauce. Leave to steam at low temperature for 10-12 mins. That's where the recipe really went west.
This dish is supposed to look like this . If you look at mine, it obviously doesn't. It's supposed to be nice and crusty, and you scrape it off from the pan with a knife. It just stayed a regular couscous, with some tomato and onion. An ok starchy side dish, but just blah.

While certainly not a disaster, this was definitely a fail. I guess next time I should make sure I really follow the recipe, but I wonder if there's something else I did wrong, because it didn't solidify at all like it was supposed to.

In which courgette hamburgers go pear-shaped, or rather shapeless

                                          This tasted better than it looked...

I fail  meatballs, it seems.I remember once I attempted to make some with bread crumbs and ground beef, and the result wasn't pretty. I wanted to try this recipe because I often eat chicken burgers (as in, those you buy already made) and I liked the courgette combination. But something didn't quite go well in the meatball-making process, as is obvious from the photo.  Possibly the usual reducing-proportion issue? Or that I was in a hurry and was running around the kitchen like those cuisine programmes where people have to make a 3-course meal in 30 seconds, or something? Anyway, here goes:

- This recipe goes with a sauce which, as can be easily inferred, shows that this is a Jerusalem cookbook and not a Jewish one, and I understand that Arabs often use dairy-based sauces for meat:

Mix in a small bowl 100 grs sour cream, 1 cup Greek yogurt (but I used some nice one from the Swiss countryside), a teaspoon of crushed garlic, lemon juice, salt pepper. You're also supposed to put sumac in it. Now, Yotam and Samimi, I thought I'd gotten by now all the spices I needed, what the heck is sumac? Needless to say, I went sans sumac. Put in the fridge.

For the meatballs, mix in a large bowl the minced turkey, 2 teaspoons crushed garlic, cumin, one egg, salt, crushed mint, pepper, 3 roughly grated mini-courgettes. Mix and make into meatballs. Here, I had the impression there wasn't enough meat in proportion to the other ingredients. Maybe the mistake was that, after putting 2 mini courgettes, I went "There's no such thing as too much courgette! Plus it's green and colourful!" thus producing an excess of courgettitude.

Afterwards, you're supposed to fry the meatballs in heated sunflower oil. I never pre-heat oil, I think it's healthier and reduces the risk of hot oil going all over the place...But this is where my already poor-looking meatballs began to undo themselves. I was tempted to transform the whole thing in a kind of chili, but still went through the rest of the recipe, putting the meatballs in the oven at 200 C for 7 minutes. This is when they lost all semblance of meatballness. However, it actually tasted good! The sauce was nice too, but then I'm a sucker for anything containing sour cream. And I wouldn't advice making this dish for a romantic dinner, since it's a bit garlic-heavy. Either that, or remove the garlic.

So there's definitely room for improvement in this recipe, as in, I basically need to improve my meatball-making skills. Because right now, I couldn't have really brought the dish to a picnic or as lunch to work, as Mssrs Ottolenghi&Tamimi suggest (they say it's "portable").

Behold the kranz!

You know the bit in Julie and Julia when Julie needs to debone the duck? The kranz was sort of the equivalent for me (albeit I'm not attempting to cook all of Jerusalem, that would be slightly insane). But the kranz comes with a warning that it's "neither easy nor quick to make", i.e. not generally what I go looking for in a recipe. So I decided it would be a nice challenge for those lazy, cooped-up days around Christmas. It turned out more of a challenge than I expected, and not for the reasons I thought. Suffice to say, it's supposed to sit overnight but it took three flippin' days to make. Something didn't quite go as it was supposed to, though I managed to fix it. Still, this is a labour of love.

I still haven't gotten round to explaining what  a kranz is: it means "crown" in German and is a uber-Askhenazi cake (one of the few in this more Mediterranean-centred book) with a chocolate filling that is made into two "braided" parts (hence the crown or garland). Here is my recipe, with my adaptations and the further adaptions I plan to make should I attempt to repeat the experiment.

Ingredients:
270 grs flour
50 grs caster sugar
half a cube of yeast (the original recipe calls for "fast-action dried yeast". Now, if someone happens not only to be really reading here but also to be British,can you explain what this is? Because I don't get the point of fast-action yeast in cake that's supposed to sit overnight)
60 mls of water (probably more water is needed)
1  egg (possibly will put 2 next time. That's when dividing by 2 becomes tricky, if you have 3 eggs in the original meant for a ginormous and ravenous Jewish family)
1/3 tsp salt
70 grs butter
sunflower oil
Ingredients for the filling
25 grs icing sugar
15 grs cocoa
70 grs dark chocolate, melted
60 grs butter
The original recipe calls for pecans. I don't really do pecans. 
Place the flour, sugar and yeast in a mixer and stir everything together (I'm going to do this by hand next time). Add the eggs and water and continue stirring until the dough comes together. Add the salt and start adding the butter, a few cubes at the time. Continue mixing for about 10 minutes until the dough is elastic and shiny. Place the dough in a large bowl, brush with sunflower oil, cover with cling film and leave in the fridge overnight.
This is where the drama began, because the dough didn't grow overnight and I didn't get to sleep in for no reason! So I left it to sit the whole day, out of the fridge this time, and ended up adding a bit of water. So, by the evening, it had finally grown and could move to second part of the recipe. I'll leave out of the fridge next time.
Melt all of the ingredients in a saucepan.  Spread the dough with a rolling pin and cut the edges so that it's more or less rectangular.  Now the scary part comes, which isn't really so scary. Spread the chocolate paste on the dough. This caused further drama, since the filling was liquid, I assume it's supposed to be a Nutella-like paste. Maybe more chocolate would do the trick? Anyway, if I say so myself, I brilliantly solved the problem by later putting the roll in the fridge. Brush with water the long end further for you, then start rolling the long section that's closer to you. You end up with a rolled-up sausage. Put in the fridge so the filling becomes solid. Then, more of the not so scary scary part: cut the roll lenghways and weaves together the two parts, ideally letting the sectioned part up so that the chocolate "drawing" shows. Put in a baking tin and leave in the fridge overnight. Bake for 40 minutes at 190 c.

Now, once the feat was accomplished, what did the kranz actually taste like? It tasted nice, but not as heavenly as to justify all this work. This is a recipe that definitely needs fiddling with and practice. But I definitively learned some things from it, namely how to create plaited cakes with filling.