#stews

Enjoy some recipes i documented from my late slav grandmother! (Bonus recipe for kapusta)

Dutch Oven Chili is smoky and spicy with layers of flavor and will soon become your go-to recipe for ground beef chili!  It makes plenty, so it’s perfect for a casual game day get-together or to enjoy some now and freeze some for later!

Tunisian Lablabi

I had a lot of dried peppers leftover from making pozole, and I wanted to use some more of them. Fortunately, North Africa had me covered. Lablabi is a Tunisian chickpea soup that's served over stale, toasted bread (not pictured because it's under the soup) and topped with a variety of garnishes, including capers, poached egg, tuna, lime, olives...I opted for capers and egg, since the broth itself is kind of thin, and I wanted this to be a filling dinner.

However, don't assume 'thin' means 'no flavor.' Lablabi is made with harissa paste, which is a SUPER flavorful spice mixture made of (callback here) dried peppers, roasted red peppers, cumin, coriander, garlic...all the good stuff! And this soup is amazing. It's warm without being terribly spicy, savory, salty, a little bit sour from the capers, rich from the poached egg...the chickpeas are tender, and even if you don't much like the taste of them you might not even notice them under the taste of the harissa. The bread soaks up all the soup and becomes delightfully soft and bursts like a little dumpling in your mouth, and the best thing is that you can make loads of this soup for relatively cheap, AND it freezes well!

I used this recipe from The Mediterranean Dish, as well as their linked recipe for homemade harissa paste.

Things I changed:

I added some baby spinach because the only vegetable in this soup is onion, and I'm trying to avoid getting scurvy

I topped this with a poached egg and some capers, but you can also do pickled turnips, tuna, lemon, olives, green onions, and I've seen

When I made the harissa, I left out caraway seeds. This is one of the flavor profiles that I've learned I can't stand -- it just tastes burnt and unpleasant to me no matter what it's in -- but I don't think the harissa suffered for their lack. However, if you've never had caraway seeds before, or if you're neutral on them, I highly recommend keeping them in for an authentic experience