Make Kabobs, Not War — Or How I Started With National Meatloaf Appreciation Day and Ventured Into Political Activism

The folks over at SeriousEats have an meme going this month with meatloaf. I’ve been sort of wrestling with what kind of meatloaf to make by the deadline. I came to the realization that with my upcoming trip to Denver this next week I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything particularly cool or inventive on short notice. So in lieu of a really cool recipe, I’m going to make a political statement.

Last month’s visit to the US by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad particularly enraged me, on so many different levels — that a man, particularly a leader of a foreign nation, a man who presumably has had a higher education, and a man with an technical engineering background could say such stupid, ignorant things. A man who is sending his country on a collision course with the free nations of the world, determined to arm his extremist country with nuclear weapons and presumably with the intent to use them to destroy the only true democracy in the Middle East and to destabilize the entire region. To this I say, Make Kabobs.

Iran has been something of a pariah state for the last 30 years, and is the country everyone loves to hate, and I think with good reason. But I’m a firm believer that in order to understand a country, one must respect its traditions and culture, and we must come to the realization that it’s not the oppressed Iranian people that deserve our ire, but only its government. And we can start respecting their culture and building bridges with the Iranian people by learning about their food.

Tonight, we made some Iranian-style ground meat kebabs (Koobideh) for dinner. I have to say, these are some of the best I have made yet. To make them, I went to a local Iranian grocery store in Hackensack, NJ and picked up some spice mixes, and a bunch of other things. The recipe is not much more than taking a bunch of ground meat, mixing it with the spice mix and some chopped up vegetables, and grilling it up. Kind of like… A meatloaf!

Maybe the kabobs tasted really good not just because I love Middle Eastern food, but because I spent about an hour talking to the shop owner, making friends and learning about Iranian food customs. He taught me the proper way to make Iranian lime iced tea (made from dried Persian limes) and showed me which spices are used for what dishes, and for that I am super grateful. And because of that personal service I’m going to be a return customer for sure. This, in my opinion, is how we should conduct international relations. President Ahmadinejad could learn a lot from this shop keeper.

Below is a OTB-tweaked recipe for Iranian Koobideh Kabobs, which with a few minor modifications would make a great spicy meatloaf as well. For those of you who feel uncomfortable eating “Iranian” food, you may be interested to know the same popular dish (under different names and in slightly different spice preparations) is served in Afghanistan, and also in Israel, Iraq, the Balkans, and lots of other -Stans.

Interesting Afghan factoid: Dari, the primary language spoken in Afghanistan by about 70 percent of the population, is the same language as Persian or Farsi, what the Iranians speak.

Iranian Koobideh Peace Kabobs (Or Iranian Meatloaf)

2lbs Ground Meat (Use all beef, or a mixture of beef, veal, lamb or turkey)

1oz Package of Iranian Ground Meat Kebab Seasoning (I used the one made by Sadaf out of Los Angeles, but you can try a mixture of onion powder, salt, pepper, sumac, parsley, turmeric and cumin)

2 long hungarian-style frying peppers, or cubanelles, mixture of red and green, finely chopped. Not traditional but I thought it would add that extra “something”.

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 handful of chopped parsley

2 cloves of crushed garlic

5oz of warm water

Kabob Preparation: Dilute spices in 5oz of warm water for 5 minutes to prepare marinade. After marinade is thoroughly diluted, mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Let marinate for 15 minutes. Form into ovular patties and cook on outdoor grill until desired doneness.

For meatloaf, soak two slices of bread in milk (or if you’re an Persian Jew and require a Kosher preparation, omit the milk and just use breadcrumbs) Squeeze out moisture, mix with 2 tbsp of tomato paste or ketchup and two beaten eggs. Mix with above marinated meat and spice Kabob mixture. Form in a small loaf pan, cook for 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Serve with simple rice pilaf and salad.

Beverage accompaniments: Iced tea made from boiled dried limes, or black ceylon tea infused with crushed cardamom pods and saffron.

Nice Weather = WEBER (XII): Sausage and Peppers

Sausage and Peppers are among my favorite things to grill — it’s a simple, hearty dish, and in my opinion the greatest contribution to the backyard barbecue by the Italian-American culture. Next to Hamburgers and Hot Dogs, it rates in my top 5 of ideal summer foods. The dish has been immortalized in numerous films and on television by shows and movies such as The Sopranos and Goodfellas. But like the bold and intimidating characters in those films, a sausage and peppers sandwich requires dealing it an appropriate amount of respect and care — you need to source the proper ingredients and cook it properly.

Optimally you want to get your sausage from a specialty Italian deli or butcher, or from any kind of reputable butcher shop that makes sausage fresh. This sausage is from Vitamia and Sons in Lodi, New Jersey, a very Italian neighborhood with lots of specialty Italian stores in it. I don’t particularly like to use supermarket cheapo bulk-pack Italian sausage because the fat content is way too high, and that kind of stuff is much better for rendering the grease out and using the meat in things like tomato sauces where you need to add a lot of sausage flavor.

These are sausages from Pete’s Meat in the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in ‘da Bronx. This is another one of my very favorite places for buying Italian sausages. Here we’ve got the three basic kinds — sweet, seasoned with fennel seed, hot with pepperoncini chili flakes, and parsley/cheese. All are great for use in Sausage and Pepper subs, so I usually buy a mix.

I like to use a mix of different types of peppers for my subs. Medium-thick walled Italian style frying peppers such as the Cubanelle are great to use, as are Latino and Eastern-European styles such as the long Hungarian types. I particularly like Mexican Ancho and Anaheim/New Mexico style peppers for sandwiches. The smaller spicy style pepperoncinos are great for mixing into your pepper assortment as well. You could also use regular thick-walled Green Bell peppers, but I don’t particularly like them — I like to wait until they go completely red because I hate the grassy flavor of the green kind. For onions I like to use a combination of sweet Texas/Vidalia and Bermuda/Red types.

I like my peppers to be skinless when eaten on a sandwich, particularly if they are of the larger, thicker walled kind such as the Green/Red Bell, Cubanelle or Ancho/Anaheim/New Mexico type. I find that removing the skin also removes most of the bitterness and that grassy, astringent taste that I don’t like. Roasting the peppers directly over your burner or an open fire takes care of this problem.

Once you get your peppers completely charred and black on the outside, put them all in a plastic container, close the lid, and let them cool down for about 15-20 minutes. They will steam up and the skin will loosen, and you should be able to slide most of the skin off with your fingers. You can then run them under the water to remove any excess skin, and then cut them open and remove the ribs, seeds and inedible core part. If you get a little charred black skin that doesn’t come off, it’s no big deal as it adds some nice charred flavor. I then like to chop the peppers up into bite sized pieces and saute it with some olive oil, garlic, and season it with salt and pepper. Thinner walled/thinner skinned and smaller peppers can be cut up raw and sauteed with the other peppers, or you can grill them with the onions and sausage.

Sausages should be grilled on low heat with the lid closed so they can cook through and don’t get burned up in flare-ups. A way you can keep the heat under control is to grill your slices of onion around your sausage so they give up their moisture. Before grilling, I like to toss my onions and other vegetables (Eggplant slices, Zucchini, Corn) in olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Finished sausage and pepper sub. I like to get a nice crusty loaf of bread for this purpose and toast it on grill.

Sausage and Pepper Sub closeup. A New Jersey and Italian-American classic. The sausages I used for this sandwich came from Bartolomeo in Palisades Park, NJ.

A Tale of Two Chickies

Click for Hi-Res Photos!

This week, my brother Brandon has been visiting from California, and he’s been eating a number of his meals with us. Being a Perlow, he has a pretty remarkable appetite, so we’ve had to cook a bit more than usual lately. He also doesn’t get decent home cooked meals very often, being a single guy, so we decided to make a traditional chicken dinner.

Here we have two chickens, one prepared with chopped garlic and rosemary shoved under its skin, with a tray to catch the gravy, and the other glazed with barbecue sauce (during the last 15 minutes of cooking) with the skin mostly removed just before glazing. The Barbecue sauce chicken also has a beer can with beer (about halfway full) shoved into its posterior.

Click the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more roast chickies.

The Great Off The Broiler Hot Dog Tasting of 2007

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In our previous hot dog tasting, in the summer of 2004, we evaluated 14 brands of hot dogs which could easily be purchased at supermarket chains in the New York Metropolitan area. Three years later, Consumer Reports released a similar study where the hot dogs from Hebrew National, owned by industrial foods giant ConAgra rose to the top — a result which ruffled the feathers of many seasoned hot dog experts, myself included. The gauntlet (or in this case, the bun) had been thrown down, and it was time for Off The Broiler to dust off its scoring sheets.

Click Here for Hi-Res Slide Show of the tasting day.

Click Here to view the Tasting Results data sheet (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)

Click Here to listen to the Hot Dog Tasting Podcast (34 minutes) with Jason Perlow, Rachel Perlow, Brandon Perlow, John Fox, Eric Eisenbud, Jonathan Lurie and Jordana Z.

Click Here to listen to the supplementary audio (2 hours and 23 minutes) with all the panelists, where we discuss all the hot dogs we tasted real-tine. Includes hilarious bickering and arguing, and the classic “What @#$%& number is it?” Abbott and Costello sketch.

Click Here to watch some video clips of the tasting day at Google Video.

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below to read the results of the survey.

Evaluating Hot Dogs

Recently Consumer Reports published the results of its 2007 summer Hot Dog roundup, in which Hebrew National Hot Dogs (now a subsidiary of industrial foods giant ConAgra) took the prime spot.

Somewhat surprisingly, this is in complete misalignment with my own personal rankings of the major hot dog brands, and what other critical palates regard as well.

Back in 2004, I did my own hot dog roundup, and the results may surprise you. I still think much of what held true 3 years ago still holds true today.

NOTE: a much more updated version of this report, conducted in July 2007,  can be found here (click).

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry link” below to read the 2004 Hot Dog Executive Summary.

Blogroll: GirlsAtTheGrill.com

Elizabeth Karmel is a grilling and barbecue expert whose work I discovered at Hill Country NYC, where she is acting as Executive Chef. Not only does she know what to do with her grill, but she’s a wizard at sides (oh man, her mac and cheese and her green bean casserole is to DIE for) and her desserts (banana pudding!) are truly awesome as well. GirlsAtTheGrill.com is her personal web site where Liz has all sorts of recipes to try, tip and FAQ sheets on grilling, as well as discussion forums where you can ask her all sorts of grilling and cooking questions. It’s a veritable tome of grilling advice.

And guys, you can hang out there too. Its not just for girls.

Fun with Salad

Photos by the Olympus Stylus 770 SW

(Click here for hi-res versions)

It was a brutally hot Memorial Day weekend, and after all that meat on Saturday, I knew we had to increase our veggie quotient and eat something a bit more healthy and refreshing.

Here we’ve got some grilled skirt steak that I marinated in a Vietnamese-style marinade overnight, plus some King Oyster mushrooms that have been sliced lengthwise and grilled with a soy/butter glaze.

This salad has romaine lettuce, hearts of napa cabbage, garlic scapes, cherry tomatoes, english cucumbers, red onion, red bell pepper and rice noodles. The dressing is based on “Thai Beef Salad” from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet

Salad presented with sliced skirt steak, king oyster mushrooms, blanched Gai Lan tips, peanut garnish.

Closeup

If you grow chives in your herb garden and you let them grow too high, they will start to flower. But this is not a problem, because the flowers are actually edible, and they have a very strong oniony flavor. So you’ll want a sweeter-style salad dressing if you use them.

Chive flower closeup

Here we’ve got a mesclun and spinach salad with supremed graprefruit slices, in a garlic/mustard/honey vinaigrette, with pignoli nuts.

Closeup of salad using chopped chive flowers as garnish.

Nice Weather = WEBER (XI): Ribs

A recent topic on Ed Levine’s quite excellent SeriousEats.com site gave me a serious craving for BBQ ribs over the Memorial Day weekend. So I decided to head over to one of my favorite butchers, Kocher’s Meats in Ridgefield, and picked up a couple of racks of baby backs and some spare ribs for some good eatin’.

Wanna learn how to make ribs that come out like this? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Roundeye Korean Barbecue II

In a previous post I talked a bit about how to do Korean BBQ at home. Short of being able to obtain Korean-style short ribs in your area, you can still make use of that incredible Korean marinade on other meats, such as flank steak and thin-cut top round steaks that you can easily find in the supermarket.

It’s Bulgogi time. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Nice Weather = WEBER (X): Kebab-O-Rama

After two consecutive visits to Beyti Kebab, I couldn’t get that taste out of my brain and I wanted to try to replicate the taste of adana kebab and beyti kebab at home. And when you’re very hungry, nothing beats a whole bunch of meat grilling up on your Weber.

For my home, clearly interpreted and modified version of adana kebab, I went with 85 percent ground beef, because it was on sale at the supermarket and I am on a mild health kick. However, I think that the 80 percent version will come out juicier. If you can get some ground lamb, even better — go 50/50 beef and lamb.

The original adana kebab is made completely with lamb but I think a mixture is better. Greeks, Israelis and Lebanese have similar kebabs made with mixed meats, such as Kefta/Kufta/Kofta Kebab and I have incorporated some of those ideas as well.

The recipe or technique we are trying to achieve is to get an authentic Middle Eastern flavor using supermarket ingredients on a typical gas home grill. If you’ve got a charcoal grill, even better. We’re combining various recipes of adana kebab (named after the Adana region of Turkey) and beyti kebab, which is similar but also has garlic and other herbs and spices in it and is named for a famous kebab restaurant in Istanbul.

Nice spring weather means its Weber time again! Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.