Mohamed Meshref's Kitchen

Negresco Penna Pasta with Bechamel Sauce

2008-06-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is my own special edited recipe, I've many addition to the traditional one, so enjoy :)

Ingredients:

1- 1.5 bags of Penna pasta.
2- Table flour (either white of whole wheat).

3- Sour cream

4- Milk

5- Turkey strips or chicken strips

6- Sliced Mushroom

7- Black non-salted (or salted) olives.

8- Steak spices (or simply salt + black pepper), steak spices is much better.

9- Shredded cheese for topping (the best I found is the 4-cheeses topping)

First of all you need to cook the pasta and the Turkey strips, to cook the pasta simply boil some water and when the water boiled add the pasta and keep moving it around every couple of minutes until it's ready, you may add a tea spoon of salt of not if you like.

Then cook the Turkey by adding it into water and but them to boil, add the spices to the turkey and make it a little more salty than usual (because we'll use the water in making the sauce).

Now to create sauce:

1- Add the water from the Turkey after it's cooked to the milk and sour cream, add initially 5 table spoons of flour.

2- Keep rotating the mix, keep adding flour until you get a high dense sauce.

3- Now the sauce is ready to be used.

Final steps:

1- Remove 1/3 of the sauce for topping and put the pasta on the remaining amount and mix them very well.

2- Add half the pasta into a big pasta container and put the turkey strips, olives, and Mushroom on the top and then add the second half over them.

3- Add the remaining sauce over the top.

4- Add the topping cheese over the top.

You will get this before it's finally cooked:

5- Heat the over to 375 degree fahrenheit (or around 190 degree celsius).
6- Put the pasta in the over for around 30-40 min (or until the top became golden)

Now this is the final result:

Next posts I'll post how to do Biryani chicken, Tandoori chicken and Kabab Hala

Basmati Rice

2008-06-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

1- 1.5 cups of Basmati Rice

2- 1.5 tea spoons of salt (may be 2 if you want it a little salty).

3- 1 tea spoon butter.

4- Elettaria

5- 3/4 table spoon of Turmeric powder.

Steps:

1- Wash rice very good until the water comes clean from it.
2- Add rice + 2.5 cups of water and put them on a high degree temp (if the temp scale is from 1-10, put them on 7-8)
3- Wait until the water boils, then add the butter, salt, Elettaria and Turmeric powder and decrease the temp to level 3
4- Cover the rice (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, IF YOU DON'T DO THIS THE RICE WON'T BE STEAMED AND YOU'LL GET A VERY BAD RESULT)
5- After 10-15 min (or when water begins to dry), move rice upside down one time and cover the rice again and decrease the temp one more level.
6- When the rice completely dry, it's ready to be served :)

Alexandrian Liver (Kebda Eskandarany)

2008-06-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

What you'll need:

1- 1 KG of beef liver slided into tiny slices or small cubes.
2- 5 Table spoon vinegar.
3- 1 big green fresh pepper cut into small slices or cubes.
4- 1 table spoon cumin
5- Salt (it depends about how much salty you want it, but it's about 1.5-2 tea spoons of salt).
6- Black Pepper (optional).
7- 5 big table spoons of garlic (either powder or fresh)
8- 2 Lemons juice
9- Oil

Steps:

First of all put the garlic vinegar, cumin, salt and black pepper with the liver very good and leave them in the fridge for 15 minutes at least.

Heat the oil and then put the liver into it and keep moving it around for a while until the color of the liver changed, then decrease the temperature and leave it for 5-10 minutes.

Add the green pepper and leave them together for another 10 min and keep moving them around every 1-2 minutes.

Now it's ready, you can add lemon and Tehina if you want (see the last post for Tehina instructions).

It will look like this when it's raw:

And this after it's done :) :

The next post will be Chicken Negresko.

New posts

2008-06-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since the latest post, the problem here is that I wanted to post recipes only with photos, but I'll start posting more even without photos to have more posts :)

Grilled Boned-Chicken

2007-11-19T15:42:00.001-08:00

One of my favorites and one of the simplest recipes ever.

All what you'll need:

1 complete chicken.
Salt (depends on the salt's quality, but if it's high quality salt, then it's about 1.5 small spoons of salt per one medium size chicken, or you can always taste the sauce before you use it over the chicken).
3 big spoons of chopped Onion (either fresh or use powdered onion instead).
1/2 small spoon of Turmeric (Aka كركم).
1/2 small spoon of Black pepper.
1 big spoon of chopped garlic (or powder garlic as well) just if preferred.
3 big spoons of vinegar.
1 small spoon of Thyme (Aka زعتر)
5 pieces of Elettaria (Aka الهيل or الحبهان)

To make Tahinh salad, you'll need:

5 big spoons of Tahinh.
5 big spoons of water.
1 small spoon of vinegar (if preferred).
1 big spoons of garlic powder (or use 2 spoons if fresh one).
1/2 small spoon of table salt.
1/2 small spoon of chopped onion (if preferred).
1/4 small spoon of black pepper.

I'll start first with how to do the Tahinh salad as it's easier, what you'll need is to add all the components together in a deep dish and start working out with a fork in the solution and moving in circles until you make one homogeneous fluid (you can add more water or put less water depends on how you want the salad to be).

Now to the main dish itself, first wash the chicken very well, and cut it into two halves starting from the neck till the bottom of the chicken as shown in the photo:

Then use a good cleaver to cut each half but not completely, just enough to break the bone and leave about 10-15 cm between each cut as shown in the photo here:

The next step is to add the salt + the onion + the turmeric + the black pepper + the garlic + the vinegar + the thyme + the elettaria

And put them together very well then add them to the chicken (if you're using a small container like the one below, you can add water as well to be able to correctly distribute the spices correctly:

Cover the chicken and leave it in the fridge for at least 6-12 hours (the recommended time is at least 12 hours).

Now you can use any grill you want, I used fire grill and this was the final result:

Next time I'll post either how to do Turkey Bashamel Pasta with 4 cheeses or how to do Kabab Hala (a kind of kabab but it's using pots instead of doing it directly over the grill, it's much easier to be done).

Kitchen?!

2007-11-19T15:13:00.001-08:00

Just an idea which came to my mind, since I used to cook for myself for the last 2 years and I began to be good in doing this, I thought i will be good if I published "how to do X recipe" here.

Just a small note, don't expect this blog to be updated frequently, because I'll be posting the recipes with photos, which means I need to do the recipe first in order to be able to take some photos, lucky me I've some photos available for the last one, which will be the first post here :)