Kuwait, four layered meal

مرحبا,

Kuwait is a Middle Eastern country where we decided to cook chicken and rice with daqoos. Daquoos is simply a tomato, garlic sauce from the country.

The dish was nice and the method of cooking even better, there were four separate components to the meal, the rice which was cooked with turmeric flavouring and chicken broth, the chicken which was boiled, coated with flour and fried. Then there was the onion and nut with raisin component followed by the daquoos, a tomato and garlic sauce.

The method of cooking the rice was tasty and different, very nice and I liked the dusting of flour on chicken before frying.

وداعا

Sam’s rating: 8/10

Kosovo, a bit of yoghurt marinade is nice, too much yoghurt not so much

Përshëndetje / здраво,

Kosovo, a very new nation in its own right but still a disputed territory of Serbia (it declared independence in 2008). The country has two official languages being Albanian and Serbian.

Similarly to everything else, the cuisine is a mixture of Albanian and Serbian dishes. We decided to cook a more traditional Albanian dish called Tave Kosi as the Kosovans typically have dairy with every meal.

 While I have loved yoghurt marinade to date with the Egyptian and Jordanian recipes being among my favourite there is certainly too much of a good thing, if you call that good. For the recipe we used 800 grams of yogurt (we scaled the recipe back a little), that much yogurt spells trouble.

I got through my serving, but only just. Needless to say, most of the leftovers ended up in the bin.

Lamtumirë / збогом

Sam’s rating: 4/10

Kiribati, fussing over Lobster

Hi,

Kiribati, sometimes known as Christmas Island (but not the Australian territory one) is extremely small and I ended up doing a red circle around where it is located as my map doesn’t even have it marked. The dish is one that I was looking forward to since it was my first chance to try lobster in my life, a delicacy in Australia. I ended up being severely disappointed with the roasted lobster with coconut curry dipping sauce.

The lobster was strong flavouring, somewhat chewy and tasted a bit like crab to me. Bec loved her lobster but when she tasted mine she observed how different they were as she agreed with me.

So maybe I ended up with a bad lobster, if that is the case it is probably for the best at $70 a kilogram!

Goodbye

Sam’s rating: 6/10

Kenya, not the best for braces

Habari,

For Kenya we decided to cook Kuku Paka, not a good dish to cook when you have ceramic braces as it stains the clear ligatures, a good thing I have a check-up shortly.

I always like a good curry and this was very nice, the coconut adds a special flavour to it along with the coriander (cilantro)

Kwaheri

Sam’s rating: 8/10

Kazakhstan, horse? No thanks, anything but

Сәлеметсіз бе

This Baltic state consumes a lot of horse meat with the national dish, besbarmak consisting of boiled horse. Given this, it was somewhat difficult to find a recipe which we could cook in Australia.

We decided to cook Kazakh lemon chicken. The chicken was quite nice but I prefer the chicken cooked in other ways with other spices!

Сау болыңыз

Sam’s rating: 7/10

Jordan, a tasty yoghurt marinated dish

مرحبا

For Jordan we decided to cook a lamb dish, mansaf, which is served with rice on khubz bread.

The lamb was marinated in Greek yogurt, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, paprika and cardamom. The recipe called for clarified butter which was an interesting procedure.

There is something about yogurt based marinade that I really quite like. The butter dribbled onto the khubz bread also made my taste buds dance.

وداعا

Sam’s rating: 9/10

Japan, where things aren’t cooked

こんにちは

Japan, there is one dish the Japanese are so very fond of and has gained popularity around the world, sushi. We decided to prepare sushi (can hardly say cook can I?) to represent Japan.

The dish was actually surprisingly simple to make, the rice is really sticky having been cooked with rice vinegar and other ingredients. The sticky rice is then put on the nori sheet and then the desired vegetables and fish are added. Once that is completed you simply roll it up.

I had never had sushi before, probably surprising given the number of sushi places around. Sushi was much better than I thought but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it.

さようなら

Sam’s rating: 6/10