The Soaked Bean

Seeking Nourishment, Finding Traditions

Meat Monday: Kibbeh Bil Sanieh + Nostalgic Food

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pine nuts

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgic food, what it means when we eat something that’s linked to a cultural experience, a specific place or person.

There’s this study that was conducted more than 10 years ago that I often turn back to. In essence, it tested the nutritive value of nostalgia, of pleasure in food, in eating.

A group of Swedish women and a group of Thai women were given two meals (one, traditionally Swedish, the other traditionally Thai) with the same nutritional content of iron and then tested to see how much iron they’d absorbed from each meal.

This study was conducted when the idea that “a calorie is a calorie” was huge (which I suppose, in some circles, still is), and I imagine that their findings were, at the time, a revelation.  The Swedish women absorbed only half the amount of iron from the Thai meal as the Thai women and vice versa.

But it didn’t end there.  Both meals were placed in a blender and each group was given a blended version of their traditional meal.  Once again, absorption rates were far lower than when they’d eaten the meal as they remembered it and when it was, most likely, beautiful (because can we all just admit that blended is not nearly as beautiful as un-blended [which is why all sorts of berries and bee pollen are added to the tops of smoothie bowls, yeah?]).

This study is still fascinating to me for 2 main reasons.

#1: Nostalgic foods, comfort foods do more than just nourish our weary souls; they increase the absorption of nutrients that nourish us in a very tangible way.

#2.  The lattice-crust, the edible wildflower, heck, even the parsley garnish.  These little touches that make our meal more beautiful also make our meal more nutritious.  Turns out there’s a deeper calling to make our food beautiful than impressing our dinner guests or instagram followers.  (That being said, I know this dish isn’t *technically* the most beautiful [it is essentially a meat-pie, after all], but the pine-nuts and sage-leaves and pretty pattern do help).

bahart meat kebbeoven

Which brings me to kibbeh, specifically kibbeh bil sanieh which is essentially meat and pine nuts in a meat and bulgur shell.  Kibbeh is an incredibly nostalgic food for me.  Growing up with an Iraqi grandmother she always seemed to have a pie plate of it in her fridge, which we often ate cold and with a side of torshi.

I don’t have my grandma’s recipe for kibbeh, sadly, but this version comes pretty close.  For those w/o deeper ties to middle eastern culture, perhaps you’ve tried other kinds of kibbeh — football shaped and fried seems to be the most ubiquitous –braise those in tomato sauce and you’ve got a traditional Iraqi preparation, though one I don’t ever remember my grandma making.

I’ve been wanting to recreate her version of kibbeh for a while now, as for me, it’s a perfect Summer food, when you want to reserve turning on your oven on for fruit pies and the like.  You can make it at the beginning of the week and you can keep it in the fridge and bring it along on picnics for days after (I’d say at least 3), or you can even freeze half of it for those Summer nights when a dinner-game-plan has fallen by the wayside.

kebbeh plate

Kibbeh Bil Sanieh

For the baharat (adapted slightly from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem):

Ingredients:

  • 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
  • 1 small cinnamon stick, cut into shards
  • 1/2 teaspoon cloves
  • 2 teaspoons cumin seeds
  • 2 teaspoons cardamom puds
  • 1/2 whole nutmeg grated

Directions:

Grind everything together in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder.  Store in sealed glass jar.

For the dough:

Ingredients:

  • 1 and 1/2 cup bulgur wheat, soaked overnight and drained thoroughly the next day
  • 700g ground grass-fed beef
  • 2 large yellow onions, cubed
  • 2 tablespoons baharat
  • 1 teaspoon Celtic sea salt
  • handful of sage leaves

For the filling:

Ingredients:

  • knob ghee
  • 1 large yellow onion, minced superfine
  • 1/2 cup beef bone broth
  • 500g ground grass-fed beef
  • 1 tablespoon baharat
  • sprinkle Celtic sea salt
  • 1/2 cup pine-nuts

Directions:

  1. Make the dough first, as it should chill for at least 2 hours in the fridge.  Add cubed onions to a food processor and process until the onions start releasing their juices.  Add beef, baharat, salt and bulgur to processor and process until everything comes together in a pale-colored, paste-like dough.  Cover and chill in the fridge.
  2. On medium heat, toast the pine nuts until golden brown.
  3. While pine nuts are toasting, heat big skillet on medium-heat and melt ghee.  Add onion and pinch salt and let cook for a few minutes.
  4. Add beef, salt, bone broth and baharat and cook until everything is browned.
  5. Turn off heat and mix in pine-nuts, reserving a few for the topping.
  6. Set aside meat mixture and let cool.
  7. Start the crust:  separate your dough into two even halves.  Use a little bowl of cold water to dip your hands while molding the bottom crust (it will make it easier to shape the crust).
  8. Add filling.
  9. For the top crust: Grab little pieces of dough and mold into a ball.  Press the ball flat between your palms and place it atop the meat filling.  You’ll work like this for the top; almost like patchwork, patching the little flat pieces together until they completely cover the filling.
  10. Score your kibbeh — here is a lovely illustration.
  11. Press your thumb into the center of the pie down to the pan.  Add a little olive oil to a bowl and use a brush to make an oil-wash on the top of your kibbeh.  I made a pattern w/ pine-nuts and sage leaves on mine; get creative, go wild!
  12. Bake in oven at 180C for 30-40 minutes, or until kibbeh is browned and crust is cooked through.
  13. Serve w/ fattoush, torshi and cooked greens.

 

Unmade Hummus Salad + Everyday Beans

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chickpea salad

My lovely friend Vivian wrote to me recently, wondering how to be sure she’s fulfilling all her nutritional needs during the week.

She’s vegetarian, but regardless of your dietary preference, it’s a darn good question and one that, in all our clamoring toward eating clean, we can often overlook.

And while it’s true that we all have different constitutions and some differing dietary needs, we’re also all just .01% genetically different from each other and there’s definitely (I’d say mostly) some dietary common ground.

So, to rephrase Viv’s question, how can we best nourish ourselves?  Week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year-to-year-to-year?

chickpeas

We’ve all heard there’s certain amounts of nutrients we need daily.  The recommended daily intake.   X amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates, x amount of vitamins B12, B9, x amount of minerals magnesium, zinc.

I say x amount because depending on what literature you’re reading, depending on what country you’re living in, depending on who you’re talking to, these amounts can, and often do, change.

Now, there’s a few things you can do with this information.

You can start weighing your food, ensuring that you’re hitting those numbers, however subjective they may be, those 46gs of protein (if you’re a woman), the 2.4mcgs of B12.

Maybe you take some supplements to make reaching those numbers a bit easier.

Or, you can just disregard them altogether.

You can start taking cues, not from numbers, but from ancestors, including those living (and thriving) in the Blue Zones, the places where researchers found a startlingly high number of centenarians, folks living up to and over one-hundred years.

soakedbeans

Blue Zones + Beans

The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, Sardinia, Italy, Ikiria, Greece.  These places have more in common than sunshine.  They have close-knit communities, active bodies well into “old-age”, well-worn ways to de-stress, ties to ritual, religion, family, tradition, including, coincidentally enough, tradition in food.

The diets of these communities have a few things in common: good fats, some nutrient-dense animal foods, some vegetables and lots and lots of beans.  Yes, beans.  In fact, if there were a Blue Zone food pyramid, beans would be its foundation.

mixedsalad

Beans are nourishing for so many reasons, not least their unique fiber/protein content.  Fiber and protein are the two most valuable nutrients in blood sugar regulation, which is essentially our bodies’ main mechanism for keeping us energized.

Beans stabilize the flow of food into our digestive tracts and stop food from being broken down too quickly (think of the sudden surge of energy and the resulting crash after say, satiating with a candy bar or a juice) or too slowly.

Much of the fiber found in beans is insoluble, meaning that it doesn’t get digested until it reaches your colon, where it then feeds bacteria that produce short chain fatty acids, which give fuel to the cells lining your intestinal wall, making it that much easier to break down and assimilate nutrients from food.

Beans also contain phytonutrients like flavonoids (all things anti-inflammatory) including quercetin (eases seasonal allergies), kaempferol (strong anti-oxidant) and myricetin (lowers cholesterol).  They also contain the mineral manganese, which helps keep the energy-center of our cells, the mitochondria, strong.

In short, beans keep us energized right down to the center of our cells.

Gives new meaning to the old hill of beans idiom, eh? (wearing my “Canada” hat whilst typing this).

tahinimixin

I eat beans nearly every day.  A miso-based salad dressing (fermented soy bean), peanut-butter toast (yes, the peanut is, in fact, a legume), baked beans w/ eggs over-easy, black-bean burrito, pea mint mash.  I soak a batch or two per week (ahem, soaked bean), rotating between black beans, white beans, green lentils, red lentils, flageolet, chickpeas.

I usually add them to rice bowls, or fry an egg on top of ’em, or smash them up on toast, or blitz them w/ some olive oil.

This salad is a result of a fridge full of chickpeas and a craving for something more substantial than hummus (or maybe an aversion to cleaning my blender).  It’s achingly simple to make, and I’d venture to say is even tastier after spending a few days in the fridge.

Getting into the habit of soaking and cooking beans once or twice a week is one way (and there are many others) to ensure all your nutritional needs are being met, and it even comes with the added benefit of connecting you to something much older than us all, to ritual, to tradition.

unmadehummus

Unmade Hummus Salad

For the dressing:

Ingredients:

  • 4 heaping tablespoons tahini
  • juice of 1 large lemon
  • 7 tablespoons water
  • pinch salt

Directions:

  1. Add ingredients to a jar.  Seal and shake.  The consistency should be runny like liquid honey, add more water if necessary to achieve this.

For the salad:

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups chickpeas, soaked overnight in warm water
  • 1/8 teaspoon baking soda
  • Some dried bay leaves and some whole black pepper
  • 1 whole bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped thin (use the stems!)
  • 2 large carrots, grated
  • 1 shallot, minced
  • Glug extra-virgin olive oil

Directions:

  1. Drain and rinse chickpeas.  Add to large pot and cover with cold water.  Add baking soda, bay leaves and black pepper (these all help make the chickpeas a little easier to digest).  Bring to a boil and skim foam that rises to the top.  Lower heat, cover with lid and let cook until tender (30-45 minutes).
  2. Spoon chickpeas with slotted spoon onto clean tea towel in batches. Rub gently to remove skins.
  3. Add chickpeas, parsley, carrots and shallot to a large bowl.
  4. Pour over dressing and mix.
  5. When serving salad, add olive oil.  (This will help salad keep better in the fridge).  Serve over lettuce, with wheat-berries, wild rice, or just enjoy it on its own.