Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man forces you to face the dark aspects of your soul by threatening you with kitchen shears. I’m your Sinister Shearing Sensei, Jon O’Guin, and today’s lesson is cancelled so we can instead talk about a dish that’s surprising, simple, and has so many substitutions we’re basically not even actually making the dish today, because I CAN’T MAKE THE STORES HAVE WHAT WE WANT, CAROL. You can skip to the recipe with this link, while the rest of us go on a culinary journey.

Rock The Hashweh

I immediately regret using that pun so early in the post. Like a Middle-school-aged Olympian, I’ve peaked too soon.

Now, like those young Olympians, let’s see if I can stick the dismount.

So, let’s get the basics out of the way: what the hell is Hashweh? Well, according to one source I found, and literally no others, hashweh (also spelled hashwee, hushweh, and hushwee) literally MEANS “stuffing”…which is a weird claim, since there’s not really a localization or LANGUAGE attached to it, so in which language does it “mean stuffing”, random food blog? Oh, what’s that? You don’t HAVE any sources? Well why don’t I just GOOGLE it? Oh. I did, and it’s clearly Arabic. Or, rather, it’s an attempt to reproduce like, a regional dialect of Arabic. (Google translate gives the sounds for the word ‘stuffing’ as “ha-shoo” or “hash-woo-don”) SO I GUESS I MISJUDGED YOU, FOOD BLOG. (Also, why am I being aggressive to a random food blog? I’M a random food blog!)

So, it’s literally just the word for “stuffing”, as in, “that stuff you eat on the holidays”, and YES, with the same weird overlap of also meaning like “what’s inside stuffed animals”, and, weirdly, “cytoplasm”, the goop within cells. Which I think means that technically, in Arabic, all animals are stuffed animals, since they’re all filled with “stuffing”. (I legitimately don’t know if that’s how it works, languages are hard.)

Arabic has a word for “the sound of new clothes”, which apparently is written as “jafjafa”, which…sure sounds like how I expect the loose robes of arabic to sound.

The important thing is that Hashweh is basically just seasoned meat mixed with rice and other starches. It’s from Lebanon, and it’s considered something of a classic peasant’s dish in the region, because of course it is. That’s not a dig at the dish, or at the people of Lebanon, it’s a simple culinary fact:  “Here’s a hot bowl of cooked starches, maybe mixed with meat” is a UNIVERSAL peasant food. You wanna know how I know this? Look at the WORD “peasant”. It comes from the same root as “Pease”, referring to pulses like Lentils, Peas, and Chickpeas.  Irish Potatoes, Japanese Rice and X bowls, all around the world “Here’s some hot starches, maybe with some meat”.

So what sets hashweh apart? I would say…well, the exact composition of the dish is a little interesting: the BASICS are that you take a meat (beef or lamb are more traditional, though some sites I’ve checked suggest pork is good), season it with warm spices, mix it with rice (often with vermicelli mixed in, presumably for more texture) and then top the resulting dish with pine nuts and herbs such as parsley or mint. A solid number of recipes (including the one we’ll be using) also add a dried fruit component: dried currants or raisins, typically, to brighten the dish a little.

And…I’m going to say that’s basically all there is to say about the background of the dish. Because I am in a STATE at the moment, dear readers: Not a bad one, but one that is NOT conducive to cordial and correct culinary connection-creation, though apparently ain’t half bad for alliteration. A digital game night with some distant friends ran far over the time I had initially scheduled for it, taking, by the end, 8 hours, during which time I drank 2/3s of a cup of vodka. Which is mathematically roughly 3.5 shots of alcohol (assuming a 1.5 oz pour) meaning that I sobered up roughly 4 hours ago, depending on when exactly I finished that quart of cocktail I was drinking. So I am completely sober, but I WAS briefly buzzed. None of which is relevant, but I get overly explanatory when tired. THE POINT is that I am in little state to research Lebanese food or history, and my base starting point is “The one bi chick on Glee was from there, wasn’t she?”

I am very good at Glee facts.

I‘m also pretty sure the Kardashians are Lebanese-Americans. Everything else I know about Lebanon is in reference to Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, an Amish (or Mennonite? I don’t recall immediately) outpost on the east coast that was part of the region that Ben Franklin was bitching about when he worried that the filthy swarthy immigrants coming to America wouldn’t learn our language or customs, and would make our streets less safe and undermine our nation. Making one of the few times in semi-modern history that it was the GERMANS who were being deemed “insufficiently white” enough to pose a threat to national unity. Ben Franklin: even in his racism, he was truly America’s foremost inventor.

And I mean, I literally just told you how fundamental this dish is: its name is just a WORD. Like, what kind of etymological ground would you expect me to cover if we were talking about Green Salads? SO all we can do now is make the dish. Badly. But not TOO badly.

Stuffed full of Fuck-Ups

So, as I noted earlier, the version of the recipe I’m making today has several substitutions, meaning that it’s almost not polite to cite the original source at all, rather than have them answer for the Frankensteinian horror I have wrought from their well-meaning treatises.

This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them!

Politeness was never my strong suit, however, so I will note that our recipe comes from Milk Street’s “New Rules” or whatever the book’s name is, it’s in a different room, and fuck if I’m getting it. (Did I mention today was unusually hot, so my room still feels overly warm at 3:30 in the morning?) Cookbook’s pretty cool, basically suggesting a lot of new fundamental/alternative techniques for making food that can bring your cooking into intriguing new territory. As I said, I can’t be bothered to get it right now, so let’s talk about it Wednesday, and we’ll cover a second recipe from it Friday. Boom, week’s schedule sorted.

This specific recipe was from the “treat meat as a seasoning” section, I believe, which was also kind of the Beef section. Basic premise: while Americans are kind of conditioned to treat large chunks of meat per person as a normal portion I mean, most of our ‘real’ burgers have TWO ¼ pound patties, meaning there’ss “half a pound of beef” on the burger (not really: in most cases, the patties are ¼ pound before cooking, and lose a substantial amount of weight while cooking, a Double Quarter Pounder from McDonald’s actually clocks in at around 6 oz of beef after cooking, and USED to be 5.6 oz.)  Other cultures, by contrast,  tend to use seasoned ground meat as a flavor-imparting topping to a dish rather than the backbone of it. Like with the Dan Dan noodles we made, or the tiny chunks of fake meat in Cup of Noodle, the idea is getting a lot of meat flavor in the dish, without necessarily using a lot of meat.

Just a pinch of meat for the bowl.

The key to that in this recipe is in sautéing fatty beef with spices and aromatics before tossing the rice in the beef mixture to season before…boiling? For some reason I can’t think of the proper verb for cooking rice, other than “cooking”. Like, there should be a technical term for “the prolonged cooking where the rice absorbs moisture and becomes tender”. Before embiggening.

The recipe begins, as so many do, by cooking an onion. I swear to you, there’s an old joke that all recipes in Lousiana begin with "first, make a roux”, but for fucks sake, I swear ANY goddamn food made in a pot has “first, cut up an onion” as its first step. This time, we’re dicing a medium onion, and cooking over medium heat in melted butter for 10-14 minutes “until golden brown”. I don’t know what the fuck that meant, so I went until it looked like this.

Note that this looks much more yellow than it really is, due to the lighting in the kitchen. Bad lighting to have while discussing how not-golden the onions were.

(That’s not just me being contrary. Like, was I supposed to stir that more frequently, and get more of a general golden hue? Did they expect the onions to be caramelized in that time? I don’t know, so I went with what felt right.) Next, you need some beef. Now, since we’ll be using the beef fat to season the rice, the recipe specifically calls for 85% beef (meaning it’s 85% beef, 15% fat), so there will be plenty of fat left over for…the…

DUN
DUN
DUN.

FUCK. I somehow grabbed the wrong damn package of beef. Okay, this isn’t the end of the world, because luckily, I was motivated by British YouTube and my general desire to please people to pick up just the right ingredient to fix this!

To master this recipe, you must collect the bee flard.

Yes, that is a TUB of ‘beef lard’, which even Nate knew is not the proper term for rendered beef fat (“It’s “tallow”,” you can hear him mutter from under the bus I just threw him under with the use of the word “even”), and I’d picked up, as I suggested, A: to add a little more to my order from the butcher’s than just 5 pounds of bones for soup, and B: because Sorted had several recipes using “Beef dripping”, a British phrase for rendered beef fat that’s…well, it’s different from tallow in a complicated way: basically, Beef dripping tends to be rendered from actual, you know, DRIPPING: you cook a bunch fo beef things, and just pour the fat out of the roasting pan into a little tin or cup and let it build over time. Tallow…well, WE use it to refer to rendered beef fat, but in the UK, it’s a more generic form for any rendered fat, and tends to be used in more industrial settings. (ie, making soaps or candles) The POINT (as I struggle to retain as the morning draws closer) is that they’d been using it instead of butter/oil for beef-based dishes, and I thought it would be interesting to try. I just didn’t expect to do it so SOON.

Now, mathematically, this recipe calls for 8 ounces of 85% beef, and we have 8 oz of 93% beef. So we’re looking to add about 7% of Beef fat to the mix, upped to 10% since a little extra fat is probably better (and also because adding the fat increases the overall weight, meaning we’d end up with something like 9 ounces of 87% or whatever) That equates to roughly .8 ounces of beef fat is needed. So just leave the meat on the scale, and scoop out beef fat until it says it’s .8 ounces heavi-what’s that? You’ve decided to treat that as ounces BY VOLUME, meaning that you’re looking for 5 teaspoons of it? I…okay, whatever. (I actually just straight up forgot my measurement should have been by weight, and did all the math converting to teaspoons, measuring it out, and then started cooking before my brain went “wait, why didn’t we just weigh that?” )

And that’s how you learned to be flard.

THE IMPORTANT THING is that the beef, fat, and onions are now getting to know each other in the pot, along with our warm spices. This recipe calls for a relatively common Arabic spice combination that’s not super popular in American cuisine, except sometimes in Chili: A mixture of (in order of size) cumin, coriander, ground clove, and cinnamon.

It’s kind of impressive that there are 4 distinct shades of brown in this.

A list I had to change because apparently I have 4 different containers of whole cloves, and NONE of ground cloves. Luckily, ground allspice is almost indistinguishable from ground cloves, other than being not quite as strong, and indeed is actually used in several recipes where the cloves would normally be. Mix in the mix with some cracked black pepper and salt, and let the beef brown, breaking it down to little pieces.

Once that’s done, it’s time for our NEXT substitution, ALSO because I failed to check my supplies before starting: Apparently, my house doesn’t HAVE any normal long grain white rice, just short-grain. (Seriously, I thought we had five pounds of Jasmine rice, but no sign of it.) What we DID have is long grain BROWN rice. I HAVE LOST POWER. AID ME, FUTURE JON.

ALSO I FORGOT TO TAKE A PICTURE OF THE RICE ON ITS OWN, SO IT’S ALREADY MIXED WITH THE BEEF.

There’s no need to shout, I’m here. Alright everyone, it’s Monday morning….er…”Monday after the sunrise” Jon, here to wrap this baby up and get it on the plate. Where were we? Ah, yes, the brown rice. This substitution, while almost certainly improving the dish from a nutritional standpoint, ended up being part of the downfall of the dish, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

You toss in the rice, and let it toast a little in the beef mixture, soaking up the fat and flavors. THEN you add a bunch of water, cover the pot, and simmer! How long? I don’t know! By which I mean the recipe says 20 minutes, but Brown rice takes longer to cook than white rice, since its bran layer is still intact. I guessed that 30-35 minutes would be enough, and I was WRONG. (Looking at some other sources, they suggest that if you’re going to cook white rice for 20 minutes, the same amount of brown rice should be cooked for 45, but I was too busy to look it up at the time, as I was using the rice cooking time to handle another recipe.)

While the rice is boiling, you do have a couple more things to handle, if you haven’t already: firstly, you have to cut up a cup of Italian flat-leaf parsley, which….appears to ALSO be gone. Now THIS one is definitely fucking cheating: I KNOW I had most of a bundle of parsley left in here. So now someone’s thrown out my ingredients. Luckily, we actually have a CURLY Parsley plant growing in the backyard.

It’s not the best looking plant, but that’s because it survived the whole winter, and already ‘bloomed’ in March.

You also need to toast some pine nuts, a frustrating component, because without the pan to toast them this is a one-pot recipe. Your dish load gets DOUBLED by this topping. Culinarily, I’m actually a big fan of pine nuts. If you haven’t had them, they’re physically like smaller, softer peanuts (the bits in the shell), and taste like…kind of generic buttery/nutty. They’re also SUPER expensive, because they’re hard to harvest: the trees that produce them take DECADES to get to production age, and each pine cone (yes, pine nuts come from pine trees) takes up to 18 months to mature, and has to be picked by hand. Most edible pine nuts come from trees native to Italy, the western US, Mexico, and China, with the majority of production coming from China and Russia.

Those pine nuts can be a little more bitter, and quite blurry.

The last ingredient you need are dried currants, which was a pity, because the bulk dried food section at Fred Meyer’s was completely out of dried fruit, so I had to go with Craisins. (this is the second time that’s happened, weirdly) So, in short, I changed the rice, the herb, one of the spices, the fruit, AND screwed up the meat and had to tinker with it. Mathematically, that means I changed literally EVERY component of the dish at least slightly. And you know what?

You mixed all the ingredients and served it anyway?

Yes, Caption Jon, AND It was still pretty good. The major complaint was, as I noted, that my rice wasn’t done yet, so it was a little off, texturally speaking. But that was really the only complaint: Nate and I both ate it, and we agreed that it was at least fine other than the rice needing another 10 minutes or so. And if that isn’t a testament to the resiliency and appeal to the dish, I don’t know what is. I highly recommend you give it a try. Just, you know, with the white wice. Right rice. Whatever.

WEDNESDAY: WE TALK ABOUT A COOKBOOK

FRIDAY: A CONTROVERSIAL SALAD FROM NORTH AFRICA.

Recipe

Beef Hashweh (Lebanese Stuffing)

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients

4 tablespoons (½ stick) salted butter

1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

8 oz 85% lean ground beef

2½ teaspoons ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

½ teaspoon ground cloves/allspice

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

Kosher salt and ground black pepper

2 cups long-grain white rice, rinsed and drained

½ cup dried currants/raisins/craisins

3 tablespoons lemon juice

¼ cup pine nuts, toasted

1 cup lightly packed fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped

 Preparation

1. In a large Dutch oven over medium, melt the butter. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden brown, 10 to 14 minutes. Add the beef, cumin, coriander, cloves, cinnamon, 2½ teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper, then cook, stirring occasionally and breaking up the meat into small bits, until the beef is lightly browned, 4 to 5 minutes. Add the rice and cook, stirring often, until the grains are no longer translucent, 5 to 7 minutes

2. Add 2⅔ cups water, scrape the bottom of the pan, then bring to a boil over medium-high. Cover, reduce to low and cook until the rice has absorbed the liquid, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, in a small microwave-safe bowl, combine the currants and lemon juice. Cover and microwave on high until plumped, 30 to 45 seconds. Set aside

3. When the rice is done, stir in the currants and any juice in the bowl. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with pine nuts and parsley.