Date: Sunday 17th January 2021
Venue: via Zoom
Sponsor: Reem Abuwaarda
Upwards of thirty-five members, plus assorted family & friends, gathered online for the Club’s second zoom cook-along. Our sponsor & mentor was Reem Abuwaarda who was taking an enforced break, due to Covid-19 restrictions, from running the highly respected Cafe Reem in Harborne.
Menu
Palestinian Chicken Musakhan
Flatbread
Tzatziki
-o0o-
Golash or Layali Lubnan
-o0o-
Karkadeh
Ayran
Reem showcased her talents, and introduced many to the delights of Palestinian cuisine.
Palestinian Chicken Musakhan which contained the spice, sumac. This gave the dish a lemon-lime tartness which proved especially popular.
Screenshot of Reem preparing flatbreads.
Roger Hale with flatbreads.
For the Karkadeh hibiscus & cinnamon sticks were added to 1.5L boiling water. After brewing for half an hour the mixture was drained & sugar added to taste. It was served with ice to cool.
Some members found the inclusion of gin a requirement. Apparently this is not an authentically Palestinian variation.
Chicken Musakhan traditionally served in/ on the flatbreads.
The Harborne filo pastry shortage, almost certainly created by Buckland Club members, resulted in Reem demonstrating Golash (above), as well as Layali Lubnan.
APM
Spring 2021
The following observations were made by Dinner Minutes Secretary, Dave Travis. They form part of the Pandemic Minutes read at Supper with D H Lawrence.
Minutes
Emboldened by this success and with the country still locked away from a surprise pandemic that pops up to surprise people every 100 years or so we moved onto another potential winner with Reem Abuwaarda from Café Reem in Harborne presenting a Palestinian Cookalong.
‘Reem’ is an Arabic name for Gazelle with characteristics of elegance, beauty and liveliness … so perfectly suited to The Buckland Club.
Thankfully this cookalong proved a little less stressful and everyone seemed to produce mouth watering Palestinian Chicken, flatbreads and Tzatziki; again, I deffed out the dessert course as we say in Birmingham, simply out of laziness.
I’ll gloss over the filo pastry shortage which was akin to pandemic panic buying over toilet rolls and pasta amongst what I like to call ‘the general public’
Waitrose in Harborne saw a massive spike in filo pastry sales and predicting a new trend now has several hundredweight sat in their storeroom.
The Chicken Musakhan served on flatbreads was succulent and beautifully spiced, the rest of my family had caught onto my previous gluttony and snapped it all up like labradors with worms.
Traditionally Chicken Musakhan is cooked in October or November to celebrate and gauge the quality of the freshly pressed Palestinian oil, although it is generally cooked all year round these days. I was happy to share this dish with my family as I think it represents an important social aspect of dining together pulling the meat off a large central platter with chunks of flatbread whilst chatting about the day’s events and life in general. That sets an idyllic image although in my house it more closely resembled a family of Hyenas ripping the internal organs out of a dead wildebeest.
Dave Travis
Dinner Minutes Secretary
