[Sca-cooks] Lent continues

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

From: <kingstaste at mindspring.com>
>Still no word from other Lenten fasters?  Aoghann and me, what about Lainie
>and Urtatim?  I just re-read all the messages leading up to this idea, and
>Lainie said there were 6 that had expressed an interest.  So, what's up?

Well, i've been bad and I haven't made Medieval food the past two days.

Sunday i had tuna salad with tahini for breakfast and sushi for 
dinner (tuna, salmon, bbq eel, natto, and umeboshi-with-shiso-leaf).

Yesterday, i had home-fried potatoes with pesto for breakfast. Then 
for dinner i boiled some pasta, drizzled it with olive oil. I didn't 
have any spaghetti sauce or tomato sauce or tomato paste. Instead, i 
mixed together very post-period Lebanese Muhammara and an Ajvar made 
in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina.

The Muhammara is meant as a dip or spread for bread. It contains 
walnuts, roasted red bell peppers, pomegranate concentrate, bread 
crumbs, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and spices (which ones 
not specified).

The Ajvar (the "j" is pronounced like a "y") is a condiment eaten 
with meat or spread bread with feta. This particular version contains 
red bell peppers, eggplant, sunflower oil, sugar, salt, vinegar, 
garlic, and hot chilis. It's popular in lots of Balkan countries, 
such as Serbia, Croatia, Makedonia, Bulgaria, Albania... Turkey...

Today i'm going to buy ingredients for some medieval recipes. I'm 
planning to cook from The Book of the Description of Familiar Foods. 
I'm looking forward to dinners of such dishes as Samak Maqlu 
bil-Khall wal-Tahina, sliced fried fish pieces with vinegar-tahini 
sauce, and the Lenten version of Maghmuma ("hidden"), layers of 
onions, carrot coins, eggplant slices and fava beans, spiced with 
ground coriander and roasted caraway seeds, and moistened with a 
mixture of vinegar and murri, "boil until nearly done", then drizzled 
with olive oil and sesame oil and topped with a thin flat bread 
"until it settles".

This 14th century cookbook does say "Whenever dishes are cooked with 
meat, similar dishes are cooked with vegetables without meat" and 
lists a number of typical types of dishes, such as siqbaj. So I may 
try a pasta recipe and any other dishes that look good, leaving out 
the meat.

-- 
Urtatim, formerly Anahita