A Foodie's Thanksgiving!

Happy Thursday!

It’s been a really ideal week for the foodie in me, thanks to Thanksgiving and family shenanigans, so I figured I’d share a bit of my meals with you all, plus a recipe from the Syrian family.

My dining room table!

I had a great time making the American-style Thanksgiving meal this year. This is my fourth time making it without my mother, and this is the first time that I feel like the prep work for the meal went smoothly. I think that partly has to do with my familiarity with the timing of everything. Now, I just know when the turkey and all the sides should go in and out of the oven without having to look it up.

My pretty hilal turkey (and the cranberry sauce to the left)!

I had a few people comment that this was an exceptionally tasty turkey, and asking me what I did to make it so juicy. For me, I think the trick is to brine the turkey for at least two days prior to Thanksgiving. Then, first thing in the morning, I pop the turkey (covered!) into the oven at 300° F and just forget about it. I’ve even put the turkey in at 250° F the night before, and the meat was really falling off the bones by dinnertime, it was that juicy! Americans tend to freak out about whether the turkey will be cooked enough. My logic is that anything in the oven for eight or more hours will most definitely be cooked enough. And, to my knowledge, no one has gotten food poisoning from my turkeys! We got a 12-pound hilal turkey that, surprisingly, was more than enough for eight people! 

Mr. Hilal Turkey taking a brine bath.

I also made sweetpotato casserole, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and two types of mashed potatoes (the traditional American kind and then the Middle Eastern olive-oil-and-garlic kind for the lactose intolerant at the table). 

For dessert, I made my mummy-in-law her favorite treat: apple pie bites. They're so easy and fun to make, plus they look like pretty, dainty pastries at the end! 

This week's dessert: Apple pie bites!

By the time I got back to school, I was already missing Syrian food, so I made fetty. You can translate fetty from Arabic to “torn up;” the dish gets its name from the pieces of bread you tear up to create the dish’s base. Specifically, I made fettet djaj which is the “torn up” part of the dish topped with chicken.

Fettet Djaj

To make fetty, you first boil the cut-up chicken (I prefer sizes of one inch or less) in either a pressure cooker for thirty minutes or in a regular pot for 2-3 hours. S has our pressure cooker, so at school I use a regular pot and study while the chicken simmers. Anyway, in the boiling water, add salt, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, and an onion. Then add the chicken. Towards the end of the boil, fry up pieces of thin, white flat bread for about five minutes and then put them into a pie dish. Fry enough bread to cover the bottom of the dish.

Then you make the rice. I usually fry up vermicelli (“shariyya”) with olive oil at the bottom of the rice pot under the vermicelli is a light golden color, then add soaked short-grain white rice with two parts water to every part rice. I also add a teaspoon of salt for every cup of rice. Stir the rice and then wait for the rice to boil, then bring it down to a simmer, cover the pot, and only open the pot to check on the water level. If there is no visually apparent water, I usually tip the pot sideways to see if any excess water is around. If you taste the rice and it is undercooked, just add no more than a fourth of a cup to the pot and let it simmer covered for a few more minutes. Then put your rice on top of the fried pieces of flat bread in the dish.

Then create a yoghurt sauce. For a pie dish-size meal, go with about a cup and a half of plain yoghurt (“kasi wa nus leben”), one or less than one piece of garlick (“toomi o nus toomi”), and a little bit of water (“shwayyat mai”). I know the measurements sound strange, but this is literally the family recipe passed on orally since forever, and measurements of the recipe is all based on the experience of simply making it! Anyway, pour the yoghurt sauce over the rice and make sure it sinks into the rice and reaches the bottom of the dish. Next, garnish with chopped parsley and top with your drained chicken, and then enjoy a super tasty meal!

A quick note on portion size: I find a pie dish size plate is more than enough for three to four people, depending on how many of those people will want seconds just because they love how tasty it is! To double the size, you could easily use a casserole dish to feed 6-8 and just double the amount of everything in the recipe. Like most of my mummy-in-laws food, this is a non-measuring kind of recipe, so the proportions are very flexible and in the end, the amount of parsley, chicken, or yogurt all depends on your preference! But definitely don't go overboard on the garlic, otherwise no one will want to actually eat the fetty (or kiss you!). 

Anyone who tries this recipe, please let me know how it turns out! Cheers!

Ayn al-Shir: The Evil Eye

Happy Tuesday! It’s a beautiful autumn day up here in New England. I hope to get out and enjoy it a little bit between running errands around campus!

Anyway, on top of leading my first class ever, and spending about two hours on one question of my civil engineering homework, I drank coffee way too late in the day and now I can’t seem to fall asleep. The idea of doing more work right now seems cruel and unusual, so I figure I’ll write a post on one of my favorite superstitions in Arabic culture…

The eye! Al-ayn!

Maybe you’ve seen it before, because it’s also in Greek and Turkish culture too. Anyway, the ayn is a fascinating phenomenon because it explains so much about the culture while it also has a dual-meaning of being both lucky and unlucky simultaneously.

If anyone would like to comment with their own opinion on the ayn, feel free, but here’s my understanding: the idea behind the ayn is that every person wants a lot of things that they don’t have yet. Which makes sense! I know I’m definitely in that boat. I want multiple degrees, a satisfying and challenging career, and a family, which is not easy to pull off. So, the idea expands on that theory to say that a person who wants what they don’t have will look to someone who already has that stuff and get jealous. Like, I might see a hydrogeologist and want their career! The theory behind the ayn continues to suggest that a person’s desire or jealousy can create bad luck for the person who already has it all.

Now, I would hate the idea of creating bad luck for someone who is five years ahead of me in terms of life goals, which is why this superstition is a little scary, to say the least. But there’s something incredibly endearing about the ayn for me, and I think it’s because I associate it so much with my mother-in-law. If I have car trouble or if I spill a whole cup of tea on me before I run out the door, mummy-in-law will say something like, “The ayn is on you, habibti.” And even if I’m upset at my mishap, I can’t help but laugh at her confident assertion that someone is giving me serious eye.

Even if they don’t believe in it, it’s rare to find an Arab family without an ayn somewhere in the house. Now, I don’t think everyone is as into the ayn theory as my mummy-in-law, but what does this possibly illuminate about Arabic culture? Well, I’ve noticed that people can be rather humble at times when I wonder how they aren’t proudly announcing their accomplishments. A friend might wait for a long time to announce their job promotion, or avoid telling people how well they did on a test, or be shy to show friends their new car. And then, when things like that happen, I wonder how much the underlying cultural assumptions that develop the ayn also play into that tendency towards conservatively discussing achievement.

Whether or not it’s real, I still keep the eye on the wall, because you never know!