Arto der haroutunian recipes: leeks with olive oil (bras yahni, broad beans with carrots (baklali havuci)

leeks with olive oil (bras yahni)

Broad beans and carrots (baklali havuci)

So, as I've mentioned before, I love my Arto der Haroutunian cookbook.  I hadn't cooked anything from it for a while so I decided to try out a couple of new recipes from it.  Both carefully selected based on ingredients that I already had.

Well, the leeks in olive oil recipe was also selected because it involves 8-10 whole peppercorns and I have a lot of respect for recipes that involve whole peppercorns.  It was like an Armenian version of risotto or paella, this, though simpler than either.   Basically, you fry an onion (or in my case a few onions as I didn't have enough leeks), and then some leeks (1 1/2 lbs) for a while in plenty of olive oil.  Then stir in a couple of chopped tomatoes, salt, whole peppercorns, rice (not too much, just 2-3 handfuls) and (according to Arto) a 1/4 of a pint of water and simmer with the lid on for 20-30 minutes.

Frying  stuff for bras yahni

Frying  stuff for bras yahni

That didn't look like nearly water to me when I added it for the quantity of rice so I kept a fairly close eye on it and ended up adding more like a pint of water in total and it didn't (see photo) end up particularly liquidy.  You then add some lemon juice and sumac to finish.  I really liked it, think I'll be making again. It reminds me how good Middle Eastern food can be - the leeks ad lemon come through really strongly but it remains a comforting rice dish at heart.

leeks with olive oil (bras yahni)

The main reason that I decided to make the broad beans with carrots (baklali havuci) to go with it (other than having broad beans and carrots to use up) was the fantastically incomprehensible Jewish proverb that Arto quotes just before it:  "One has no appetite for eating - the other has no eating for his appetite."  What?!  Seriously, if anyone reading understands this, please do explain!

Anyway.  One of the things that's annoying about cooking is that, while sometimes there are fiddly things that are not worth doing, there are some fiddly things that absolutely are worth doing.  Like peeling broad beans. Now I'm pretty speedy in the kitchen with things like this but even I find this tedious.  And yet it is definitely worth it.

10 mins of effort:  peeled broad beans

Once you've peeled the broad beans, this is pretty easy:  put broad beans in a saucepan with a chopped onion and a little water (250 ml), cook for 30 mins.  Stir in chopped carrots, chopped mint, chopped garlic, salt/black pepper/sugar/olive oil to taste.  It's not wildly exciting, it has to be said, certainly not compared with the proverb but a nice side dish.

Broad beans and carrots (baklali havuci)

Pizza - leek/roquefort and sundried tomato/aubergine/mozzarella

Leek and Roquefort pizza

A few years ago, my lovely husband acquired a pizza dough recipe from an Italian friend of his (Guisceppe - I don't suppose you're reading but, if you are, we love you and your pizza recipe!), and we've used it regularly ever since.  It produces perfect (Italian-style, thin crust) pizza every time. 

I reproduce it below as given to us as, frankly, his directions are a lot more precise than mine.

Aubergine, sundried tomato and mozzarella pizza

Usually, we slightly ruin the purity of the recipe by piling it high with all kinds of things.  Oh, we have onions, let's put those on, look we've got half a jar of olives left over from caponata, we'll pile those on, oooh but we have that bit of gorgonzola..  etc, etc.  Our pizzas are usually half pizzas, half mountains.  Anyway. 

This time we decided - for no particular reason - that we'd try to be a bit more focussed and so we we went for one pizza with white sauce, leek and roquefort and one with tomato sauce, sundried tomatoes/aubergines/mozzarella.  We fried up the leeks before putting them on the pizza and roasted the aubergine slices.

They were Good.  

Leek and Roquefort pizza

Sundried tomato, aubergine and mozzarella pizza

Pizza dough

Leeks stuffed with blue cheese

Mmm, leeks

I really love Ottolenghi's stuffed onions, as I've posted about before, so I figured I might try doing something similar with leeks.  So, I did.

I cut the leeks so that I had the outer circles so that I could stuff them as long tubes, then - as the Ottolenghi recipe does with onion shells - boiled them in white wine and stock
for five minutes.

Leek tubes

Leek tube

Because I'm silly, I forgot that I'd need a larger pan than usual and heated up the stock and white wine in the pan I usually use for the onions.  I'm lazy about washing up so, rather than pour it into a large pan, I just put the leeks in the small pan anyway and turned them upside down after five minutes to do the other ends.  If you are less silly, you might just want to use a larger pan..

Less than sensible leek cooking method

While that was happening, I made some stuffing: finely chopped inside bits of the leeks, two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs, three small tomatoes finely chopped, about 300g of Danish Blue crumbled, 100g of Gruyere chopped, a teaspoon of mustard, a glug of olive oil, three cloves of garlic finely chopped, salt and black pepper.

Stuffing

Stuffing close up

Then, I stuffed the leeks and put them (cut side down) in the buttered pan, put enough of the stock and white wine over them to cover the base comfortably and baked for 25 minutes on 200 degrees C.

Stuffed and ready to go

Stuffed and ready to go

The result:  nice, but the leeks were a little tough, I suspect that they'd be nicer if boiled in stock for a little longer. There were a few leek skins that didn't quite fit in the oven dish so I did those as little parcels in another pan and, actually, these were much easier to get out of the dish than the long tubes were so I think that's another lesson for next time!  The stuffing was delicious, though, and I'm very tempted to use it again in other contexts - e.g. I might try stuffing onions with it next time..  or tomatoes.

Cooked leek tubes

Cooked leek parcels