I love yogurt, and cheese. Actually, I love most dairy, but mostly cheese. Yogurt comes in at a close second. Some Middle Eastern foods (mostly from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon) focus on dishes with yogurt. Most famously, Fatteh is topped with a garlicky yogurt and crunchy homemade pita chips. Some of these yogurt-based dishes include cooked yogurt. It’s really hard to explain without giving you the full recipe, but I promise you cooked yogurt is absolutely delicious. One of my favorites is Jordanian Mansaf (a traditional dish that calls for yogurt derived from goat milk and lamb). It’s served over lots of rice and large chunks of lamb meat. It’s heaven on a plate. It requires a little more work than what we (palestinians) call Labaniyeh, which is cooked yogurt with corn starch.
There are a couple steps to this dish, but they’re all fairly simple. The nice thing about the yogurt is that you can use it for stuffed zucchini, as well as kubbeh.
Ingredients
- 8 Small Light Green Zucchini
- ½ cup Vegetable Oil for frying
- Very thin Vegetable Corer
- 1 lb Ground Beef
- 1 medium Onion, chopped
- 1 tablespoon Vegetable oil
- 2 tablespoon Seven Spice
- Salt to taste
- 4 cups Plain Yogurt
- 2 Egg Whites, beaten until frothy
- 4 tablespoons Cornstarch
- 2-3 cups waster
- 1 tablespoon Cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon Nutmeg
Instructions
- Remove the insides of the zucchini without piercing the sides or the bottom.
- Discard the insides (or save them for soup later)
- Fry the cored zucchini in vegetable oil until it is browned and slightly soft on all sides, about 5-7 minutes
- Let the zucchini cool
- Stuff the zucchini with the meat stuffing, making sure to push the stuffing all the way down, and leave about 1/8 inch from the opening of the zucchini, and set aside
- Heat the vegetable oil, add the onion and cook until translucent
- Add ground beef, and cook until browned, stir.
- Season the meat with salt and seven spice.
- If you want your stuffing very finely chopped, place the meat mixture into the food processor and blend for 15 seconds.
- Place yogurt in a heavy saucepan.
- Blend egg whites into the yogurt.
- Add cornstarch
- Stir in the same direction until well blended
- Cook over medium heat, stirring regularly until it comes to a boil
- Once yogurt boils, lower the heat.
- Add water, cinnamon and nutmeg
- Carefully add in the zucchini and bring to boil
- Once boiling, turn to low and simmer for 15 minutes
