Friday 15 May 2009

Rajesh in Dubai: Pa cooks an Arabic Breakfast




Click photos to Enlarge.

Foul madammas is the traditional arabic peasant's meal.  Meant to fill you up and keep you going for the day.  I woke up with a craving for it and my father seemingly had the exact same craving so he decided to whip it up.  He did warn me that it'll be like "cement in your stomach, you won't eat for the rest of the day"  he was right, this is good cheap desert fuel.  We popped over to the lebanese supermarket to get the needed components.

Foul is Fava Beans, sauteed with green chilly, garlic, lemon and tomato.  Once cooked it's doused in olive oil.  On the side he made some 'reverse' ( as I like to call it) Coarse hummous, whipped up in about two minutes by mashing chickpeas with tahini, garlic, parsley, salt and lemon.  It's a quick hummous fix.  This was all served with slices of onion, chillies and Nabulsi Cheese  - a great salty cheese from Palestine that makes Halloumi look dumb.

The breakfast was amazing, so hearty and filling, I'll be skipping lunch and dinner.  What made it extra special was the Palestinian Olive Oil that my dad doused the hummous and the Foul in.  It's truly special and he treats it like the rolls royce of olive oil.  It's not a commercial brand, it's from a small farm in Palestine, he had it brought over in big barrels.  It's a lot more deep in flavour and complex than the Italian Olive Oils, you could drink this stuff.

I'm smuggling that shit into London this weekend in a cola bottle.

xxx

Rajesh

PS:  My dad said the best Foul he had was in a tiny little joint down a backstreet in Jordan, I keep trying to get him to blog his Jordan trip but he's too lazy.

2 comments:

Kake said...

Oh, that does look good. I'd happily eat a breakfast like that.

Re olive oil, I keep meaning to go and check out that little shop in Clerkenwell that sells small-producer olive oil (Dos Hermanos review here).

Melvin Smack & Rajesh Thappar said...

Hi Kake

I had a feeling you'd show up for this post.

Let us know how the shop is.

By the way, I really am bringing the olive oil back in a cola bottle.

Rajesh