The Couscous Challenge

Good evening, dear readers!

Yesterday, I came across a video on Youtube of British chef Kerryann Dunlop making a Turkish-inspired couscous salad. After watching it and realizing I had pretty much all the ingredients needed to make this dish, I decided to answer her call challenging us to make this recipe. I decided it was gonna be for dinner.

Here's the video:



And here's my take on it:

Even my husband loved it, and he's not crazy about couscous! (note: I have no idea why the image is rendering sideways. It was taken right-side up!)

There were a few deviations that I took when making the couscous salad. I didn't have smoked paprika, just the regular kind. I also didn't use chili peppers, nor did I feel like opening up a can of chili tomatoes to compensate, but I also added three large cloves of garlic and used different proportions of fresh herbs based on what I had available and could tolerate eating (I'm cool with cilantro and parsley, but I'm not much of a mint eater so I used the littlest bit of yerba buena I could cut off since that was the only mint I have. I'm not sure exactly what type of mint yerba buena is (I think it might actually be spearmint. It certainly smells like it), but it's a common herb used for teas by the local Mexican population. A neighbor gave us our yerba buena plant a year ago and it has gone absolutely gangbusters in the garden). I also didn't have any tomato puree like what the recipe called for, but I think in this regard it would have ruined the dish.

This is not the first time I've had couscous salad. A few weeks ago, I cooked up a box of couscous we'd been given a few years ago and added my usual salad staples of tomato, cucumber, garlic powder, olive oil and vinegar. I won't say I fell in love with couscous, especially since I'd never eaten it in my life prior to then, but I genuinely liked it. I make it a point to now always have a box in the pantry for when I feel like having some.

The first couscous meal I ever ate. Certainly not as fancy or colorful as tonight's creation, but it was good enough to get me to make it again

Overall, I was quite pleased with the way this dish came out. Next time I make this, I'll add some chicken to it since I think the two will go well together. My husband was also delighted with the result since he'd eaten his fair share of couscous in the past, but had grown tired of it as he got older and stopped hanging out at the Sufi mosque where he was introduced to the dish by some Palestinian congregants. The one thing he griped about was that it was hard for him to gum the cucumbers, but everything else was chewable for him. Periodontal disease in his 40s robbed my husband of his teeth, but he can still eat most foods and speak without impairment. The only things he really can't eat are nuts and anything really tough or hard since teeth are required there. This has proved to be a blessing for the baby cuz if my husband can't eat the food, neither can she.

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Adventures in Serbian Cooking

Greetings!

For the last few days, I've been binge watching Serbian-language cooking videos on Youtube. I've had a serious cooking bug burrowing its way through my consciousness, and so I consulted the bakas (grandmas) of Youtube for some ideas on what to make.

Since its only gonna be in the 80s this week, I thought about baking something. It will either be bread or burek. While my husband isn't much of a bread eater, I am. There is one grandmotherly Youtuber whose bread recipes caught my fancy. She calls herself Jelajelena Petrovic and her way of making breads and rolls seemed pretty easy and straightforward. They look absolutely delicious, as is evidenced in the video below.



Since I'm going off of a Serbian cooking video, whats gonna come out of my attempts will vary from the product shown. For one, I may not be able to get all the ingredients she uses in her videos (I don't remember if the Euro mart stocks Serbian cheeses/Bulgarian feta cheese or Vegeta (a common seasoning mix used in Serbian cooking)). Also, the ingredients are measured out according to European specs, where mass is used to measure out ingredients as opposed to volume, which is the American standard. My husband advised me to invest in a kitchen scale for this sort of endeavor, but we can't afford one right now. Thank goodness Google can do conversions for me.

One thing I was pleased to see was how much I understood and could follow along with the videos. I've never been particularly proficient in Serbian, but I remembered the words for ingredients like flour (brasno) and procedural steps like baking (pece). Some words I've never heard before but figured out, like black pepper (bibera) and yolk (zumance). For the words I didn't know, there was a plethora of online Serbian-English dictionaries to be found on Google.

This weekend, I will give one of Jelajelena's recipes a try. I'm looking forward to it!

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Indian Earworm: Idhi Oka Nandanavanam

Greetings!

I came across this trippy video on Facebook this morning while I was checking my feed.

This gawdy '80s+seemingly acid trip-inspired video proved to be quite the earworm. It's from a Telugu-language South Indian film called Adavi Donga. From what I could parse from the grammatically-mangled Wikipedia entry, the movie is about a man who is orphaned as an infant and raised by wild animals in the jungle; an Indian version of The Jungle Book as it were. Unfortunately, I could not locate an English translation of the lyrics to this song. It might make sense if one could actually know what the song is actually about! Indian music videos aren't necessarily presented in context with the scene, even if the song is related to the scene.

Of note, the lead actor of the film and the lone human male in the video, Chiranjeevi, would follow the path of many entertainers and venture into politics. He was an MP for the state of Andhra Pradesh in the Indian National Congress (similar to our Senators here in the US). Chiranjeevi also served in the Indian Ministry of Tourism until 2014. Chiranjeevi still remains active in Tollywood (Telugu language) media.

Have fun watching this bit of Tollywood fun. And if there are any Telugu speakers who come across this blog, would you please be so kind as to leave a translation of the lyrics to this song in the comments? I would appreciate that very much.