Eighth Rule of Cooking Club

Don’t forget to pass everything that’s on the table! That is Rule #8, and it’s a good one.

Last Saturday the On-On Gourmets met at the home of Magret de Canard for an evening of preparing and enjoying Middle Eastern cuisine. The menu consisted of the following dishes: an appetizer of Rubyan Meshwi (Emirati Grilled Prawns), Baba Ganoush, Middle Eastern vegetable salad, a main dish of Lubya Khadra Billahma (lamb w/green string beans), and baclava for dessert.

Apart from the lamb, which Ditalini cooked at home beforehand, we all participated in making the other dishes. Magret was in charge of the vegetable salad (for which I cut up feta cheese and harvested basil from a neighbor’s herb garden); Manzo & Anitra did most of the work on the shrimp and the Baba Ganoush, and our newest member Hermana Gazpacho helped with the dicing and slicing, and brought the baclava.

A most excellent mean ensued, except no one got any Baba Ganoush until the plates were cleared, when Magret remembered we were supposed to have had some and the untouched bowl was discovered sitting in front of Ditalini, hence Rule #8, a very important Rule indeed.

So we had two desserts, the Baba Ganoush and the baclava, and everything was right with the world. After dinner we played a board game while we discussed our next evening together. Because of this, that, and the other we can’t get together until mid-October, when we’ll all prepare recipes from the Pioneer Woman.