The best meal I have ever cooked (so far)
And shocking grocery news!
Last night I think I reached the pinnacle of my home cooking culinary journey with arguably the best meal I’ve made so far. This is what I made: chicken shawarma, with flatbread, yoghurt sauce, and vegetables. And this is why every bite last night was delicious:
The chicken. I used Pasturebird chicken thighs. I took the skin off and bones out myself (they don’t sell boneless and skinless thighs, sadly, but this does mean I get to make chicken crackling with the skin and turn the bones into stock).
The recipe. This is the second time I’ve made chicken shawarma and I much prefer this recipe. I used Nagi’s recipe, which is in her cookbook. (Nagi is a beloved Australian cook with a very popular website and cookbook; everything I’ve made from her site or book has been great). I had shawarma seasoning leftover from when I made roasted shawarma vegetables last week but didn’t have enough for the chicken so just followed Nagi’s recipe all the way. I marinated the chicken for about six and a half hours. The flavours were AMAZING.
The flatbread. I was going to just cook rice to go with it, but in the cookbook Nagi has a great photo of a Middle Eastern feast which included flatbread. I didn’t have flatbread so I looked for a recipe to make my own. I found a King Arthur recipe for quick and easy flatbreads so I made flatbreads for the first time ever.
The yoghurt sauce. Nagi includes a recipe for yoghurt sauce to accompany the chicken so I made that using yoghurt I had made on the weekend.
The vegetables. The Middle Eastern feast photo which was the inspiration for the dinner included tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, lemon, and fresh coriander*. I didn’t have fresh coriander, but I did have fresh parsley. And I had tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce from the CSA box that had arrived the day before.
It was about as from scratch as I could have possibly made it, using the best ingredients I could have sourced (some of the spices were Penzeys Spices), and it ended up being a meal where each individual component was delicious and together all those parts created something cohesive and wonderful. I didn’t substitute things (apart from parsley for coriander) as I often do; I didn’t just wing it and cobble together something that fulfilled the protein, starch and vegetable requirements of a meal but was maybe more fusion than traditional.
The best part was that both my husband and daughter loved it too — it’s back on the meal plan for Monday because Tilly also thought it was the best meal ever and wanted it again next week. Charlie, the three-year-old, was less enthusiastic. He happily ate the bread and vegetables and reluctantly ate two pieces of chicken after I cut off the bits with seasoning. Oh well. You can’t win them all.
Oh yeah, I made my own yoghurt
The friend who introduced me to focaccia and ciabatta rolls that I wrote about last time also convinced me to try making my own yoghurt. To be fair, the idea wasn’t new to me (I think my brother-in-law had asked me years ago if I’d ever done it) but I just never did it. It was easy enough to buy, and then for the past year or so I’ve been buying it from the same stall at the farmers’ market. I buy from there so regularly that the man at the stall recognises me, will set aside my favourite flavours if I’m late, and every now and then he’ll give me free yoghurt. I didn’t want to make my own yoghurt because I didn’t want to break up with Yoghurt Man. He’s been so nice! Whatever will he think if I stop buying his yoghurt?!
But then my friend sent me a photo of the yoghurt she was making. And she described the process. It seemed shockingly easy and, like I mentioned last time, she is a powerful influence on me. So last weekend, I attempted making my own yoghurt. It turned out really well! It tasted better than I expected (I go into new cooking endeavours with low expectations and this has served me well thus far). I’ve been eating it all week for breakfast and used it for the aforementioned yoghurt sauce.
This is going to be the new way forward, I think. Even if it means I stop buying yoghurt from Yoghurt Man. I guess I’ll only buy his feta now. It’s kind of wild to think about the emotions you can place on groceries — I’m happy about saving $20 a week by not buying yoghurt but sad about not buying from that stall at the farmers’ market.
Shocking grocery news!
This isn’t actually that shocking — something at the supermarket went up in price. I wrote in our 2023 annual newsletter that Trader Joe’s O’s had been $1.99 since forever. When I asked a manager last year about whether their price had changed, he looked it up and the computer showed that since that product was carried, it had been $1.99 with no change in price. To me, $1.99 O’s seemed as iconically Trader Joe’s as 19 cent bananas. When I went to Trader Joe’s a couple of days ago, I saw that O’s are now $2.49. It finally happened. Bananas are still 19 cents though. And to be clear, $2.49 is still a great price for a large box of cereal. I will continue to buy them, and I’m not mad or upset that the price increased. I’m just slightly amused that as soon as I wrote about how their price had never changed, their price changed. I might have jinxed it.
A final note on bread
The flatbread I made yesterday is the sixth kind of bread I’ve made recently: bread machine sandwich bread, no-knead crusty loaf, focaccia, ciabatta rolls, flatbread, pizza dough (if you count that as bread). It made me think about these different breads and doughs and how wonderfully magical it all is. They all have the same core ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast. Sometimes there’s oil, sometimes there’s baking powder. The amounts and ratios of the ingredients vary slightly. Isn’t it amazing that with some tiny changes in ingredient amounts, a few differences in rising, proofing, kneading, and cooking methods, you can end up with all this wonderful variety of bread?
This is hardly a new or profound revelation — cooking is arguably what made us human, and bread is one of the first things we ever cooked (a quick Google search tells me that bread is around 14,000 years old and is the oldest food that doesn’t require hunting or foraging). But it’s still nice to think about, as I mix the flour and water, as I see the dough transform while the yeast does its thing, as the smell of fresh bread permeates the house when it cooks, and as I see my children enthusiastically chomp away at their bread. We are partaking in an ancient tradition. Bread is such a wonderful food that has stood the (longest) test of time. Knowing that I can turn flour, yeast, water, and salt into an array of deliciousness makes me feel slightly giddy with power. Speaking of which, it’s time to get the pizza dough ready for the pizzas I’m making (tonight, for the second time in a week, I’m making Ottolenghi’s traybake pizza).
*Coriander is known as cilantro in the US.