Week 22 - Desert

The theme for Week 22 - desert - came up right as we were finishing Albania and moving on to Algeria for the AtWCC in mid-May, so it seemed like a good time to jump right in to Algerian cooking. After all, more than 80% of Algeria is desert, so it felt appropriate. I've been trying to post the AtWCC recaps in order (generally, at least for the alphabetical ones), but since I'm already doing this one for the 52 week cooking challenge and Algeria is fresh(er) in my mind, I'm going to try to do those first (other than the next few Afghanistan ones I've already written) and jump back to the other four "units" later.

For this challenge, I decided on a kefta and olive tadjine from the site, The Teal Tadjine. There are a lot of delicious-sounding recipes there, and it's been a great source for us as we explore Algerian cuisine. As I mentioned in our Bar Omar post, tadjine has always been the first thing that came to mind for us when thinking about Algerian and North African cuisine generally, so it was an appropriate first choice for our challenge.

Although the original recipe used beef, I substituted chicken here, but other than that and the flax egg replacement, stuck fairly closely to the recipe. The meatballs were made of ground chicken, garlic, onion, cubed bread, milk, cumin, flax egg, green olives, parsley, salt, and pepper, and the sauce had onion, garlic, paprika, tomato paste, preserved lemon, tomatoes, more green olives, salt, and pepper. I skipped the harissa in the hopes that if B decided to try the meatballs, they wouldn't be too spicy for him. (It was a good choice - he did have a couple!) I was really excited to try this recipe in part because I had never cooked with preserved lemon before. I love trying new ingredients!

There was a fair bit of prep to this recipe - pitting and blanching olives, removing seeds from the lemon, making the flax eggs, cubing the bread and soaking in milk, grating the tomatoes, and chopping up the onions, garlic, parsley, some of the olives, and the preserved lemon. A helped with grating the tomatoes, which was something we'd never really done before, and it's definitely a different texture than anything you can get canned. I also learned from the prep for this that pitting olives was much easier than I thought, since we usually just bought the pitted varieties from the store (but I couldn't find any that day).

After the prep, making the recipe was fairly simple. First, the meatballs, then the sauce, then the meatballs go back into the sauce and the whole thing simmers for about 20 minutes to come together. We didn't own a tadjine, so I used a risotto pan which seemed close enough.

We really liked how this recipe turned out. It was a little salty, but considering the amount of olives involved, that wasn't too shocking. It also made B happy, because he loves olives. Overall, it was a comforting, cozy recipe that was delicious. We would definitely make this again, and it was a great way to kick off our Algerian unit!