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Ahhhhhh, my dinner! :D
#1
For reference, the smells and tastes of grilled arabic food is seared into my subconscious, because I grew up in the Middle East.

Anyway so today, I made Lebanese style shish kebabs today, and holy hell did I ever knock it outta the park on this one. It tasted freakin authentic.


So.

Ground beef
red onion, garlic and fresh parsley, all finely chopped.
dry spice mix consisting of:
-sea salt
-pepper
-dry thyme (be generous)
-dry tarragon (be slightly less generous)
-generous pinch of ground cloves.
-sumac - arabic word for a grilling "spice" which is actually dried, ground pomegranate seeds.

Mix everything, let it sit outside for a couple of hours.

Using your hands, form balls that are maybe 60% the side of your fist into rolls, they should look almost like sausages. You can put them on skewers if you want, or you can put them directly on the grill, doesn't really matter all that much.

Grill em up as you would a burger. Get a little char on them. Do not ever press down on it with your grilling tools, or if you do, a terrorist named Hussein Bin Hamad Al Gabbrani will come to your house and give you a wedgie - this is not a joke, he's fucking crazy and he will actually do it.

Sides:
-Cook up some long grain rice. After it's cooked and still steaming, drop a few pats of salted butter into the rice and let it melt through. Sprinkle some more sumac onto the rice.
-hummus
-grilled bell peppers or eggplant, or tabbouli salad, or hell, even just any kind of fresh salad will do.
-alternatively, arabic pita bread (not greek) instead of rice.

fucking WIN.
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#2
(05-29-2014, 07:35 PM)CTN Wrote: For reference, the smells and tastes of grilled arabic food is seared into my subconscious, because I grew up in the Middle East.

Anyway so today, I made Lebanese style shish kebabs today, and holy hell did I ever knock it outta the park on this one. It tasted freakin authentic.


So.

Ground beef
red onion, garlic and fresh parsley, all finely chopped.
dry spice mix consisting of:
-sea salt
-pepper
-dry thyme (be generous)
-dry tarragon (be slightly less generous)
-generous pinch of ground cloves.
-sumac - arabic word for a grilling "spice" which is actually dried, ground pomegranate seeds.

Mix everything, let it sit outside for a couple of hours.

Using your hands, form balls that are maybe 60% the side of your fist into rolls, they should look almost like sausages. You can put them on skewers if you want, or you can put them directly on the grill, doesn't really matter all that much.

Grill em up as you would a burger. Get a little char on them. Do not ever press down on it with your grilling tools, or if you do, a terrorist named Hussein Bin Hamad Al Gabbrani will come to your house and give you a wedgie - this is not a joke, he's fucking crazy and he will actually do it.

Sides:
-Cook up some long grain rice. After it's cooked and still steaming, drop a few pats of salted butter into the rice and let it melt through. Sprinkle some more sumac onto the rice.
-hummus
-grilled bell peppers or eggplant, or tabbouli salad, or hell, even just any kind of fresh salad will do.
-alternatively, arabic pita bread (not greek) instead of rice.

fucking WIN.

Sounds similar to the kebab, (gwab I think it's called) we make quite a bit.
Pretty much heavily spiced ground meat spread on skewers and roasted.
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#3
Those kebabs sound tasty. I've seen sumac at the spice store, what's it taste like?
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#4
a bit sour, a little bitter, and fruity. It's one of the go-to grilling spices for lebanese and a lot of other arabic food.

(05-29-2014, 08:02 PM)johnjohn Wrote: Sounds similar to the kebab, (gwab I think it's called) we make quite a bit.
Pretty much heavily spiced ground meat spread on skewers and roasted.

never heard of gwab. But what you're describing sounds like seekh kebab.
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#5
Could be.

Her family speaks a mix of Urdu and English and unfortunately for the speed they speak the Urdu words is like watching a bullet train go by.
Hell, it took me almost two months to pronounce 'thank you' and I still struggle with the inflections so the word is understandable through my accent.
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#6
took you two months to get shukria?

Not that I should be talking... I remember almost no Hindi at all.

I remember matar (peas) and bhandar (monkey). and the names of foods lol. That's it.
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#7
Where's mine? If you didn't bring enough for everyone...
Because I said so. 
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#8
Yup.

First they say it so fast that that I had to get them to slow it down so I could hear the whole word, then there's all the implied sounds when they say it.
When they say it there's a brief rolled tr sound between the k and the r.

Plus I didn't want to repeat my brother in laws mistake when he mixed up kala and khala.
He was trying to say he was the favourite uncle, but first he said 'kala' and then he mispronounced it as 'khala'.
Which kinda worked out since he's black, but the embarrassment when he realized that he had used kala instead of kaloo was pretty obvious.

I had already had an incident where I had said dirty, but I had said it with my head turned so they thought I had said 'dutee'

And to be honest for someone with almost no real exposure to the languages the words are a lot tougher to get right than you'd think.here is almost not commonality with in the words with western languages.
Her parents speak mostly Urdu while the rest of her family speaks Hindi. Fairly close but enough differences that if you're not familiar with the different languages you can start mispronouncing stuff all over the place.

The funny part is that now I can, (often not always) hear a difference between Hindi based languages and Arabic based languages whereas before I couldn't tell.
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#9
hehe that's fair. Yeah, the sounds, inflections and accent of the languages of the subcontinent are pretty far removed from anything familiar for the western tongue. I think the only exception might be German, which has a lot of those harder sounds.

Good on ya for learning though :)
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