Beloved and enjoy themselves

  

Author Notes: This is a Jordanian recipe - one of my favorites. It's meant to be eaten over rice, which generally means white rice. Many people (including me) put plain whole-milk yogurt on the side. Amazing.


We were a bit skeptical of this traditional Jordanian dish - especially for summer - but boy were we wrong. This is one of those recipes, like pot au feu, that seem to defy the laws of cooking by coaxing an intensely flavorful sauce from water rather than broth or wine. Here, beef and beans soften into lushness, enveloped by a silky gravy of tomatoes, garlic, coriander and cumin. We used cheap stew meat, which still required almost two hours of cooking, and sturdier-than-average green beans, which held up nicely even after nearly double the recommended cooking time. We followed Susan's advice and ate the stew with a dollop of yogurt on the side, and we encourage you to as well.

Serves 6-8

1 pound stew beef
1 pound green beans
1 pound tomatoes - can be in a can
2 cloves of garlic
salt
pepper
coriander
cumin

Rub the beef with salt and pepper, place in a covered skillet, and cover with water. Stew it until it is brown.
Remove the ends from the green beans. Cut them into 1 1/2 inch pieces.
When the beef is finished, remove one cup of the broth and reserve it. Put the green beans in alongside it, and stew them until they are cooked to your taste.
Chop tomatoes and food-process with the beef broth and crushed garlic until smooth. Add this mixture to the green beans and beef. Salt and pepper generously, and add about 2 teaspoons each of cumin and coriander. Let it simmer for about an hour. For the most delicious flavor, let it sit on the stove for a while after that hour and reheat later.  

Author Notes: Bread pudding is cheating: It turns out like a pretty fancy-seeming dessert, but you skip all the hard parts by buying the bread. If you are the most ambitious member of the human race and/or a baker by trade, feel free to craft your own challah from scratch. If you are me, circle the Greenmarket once, eating samples from every bakery stand, and then purchase the most glorious-tasting loaf available Mathnasium. - Kendra Vaculin

Serves 5 to 6

4 cups cubed challah, thick crust portions removed
1 cup whole milk (don't fight this)
1 cup heavy cream (seriously, you're worth it)
1/3 cup (heaping) brown sugar
1/3 cup (heaping) granulated sugar
3 eggs
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
pinch nutmeg
1 cup raspberries, fresh or frozen (if using frozen, thaw first)
Confectioners' sugar, for dusting to serve

Preheat oven to 275° F.
Spread bread cubes into a single layer on a baking sheet and slide into the oven to dry out, for about 15 to 20 minutes. Once dry Office furniture, remove from oven and set aside. (If bread is sufficiently stale, you may omit this step; alternatively, you can use fresh bread and omit this step as well, which will yield a much more pudding-y pudding -- the cube shape of the pieces will disappear entirely. Do what you like.)

While the bread is drying, whisk the milk, cream, sugars, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg together until smooth.

Increase oven temperature to 350° F and grease an 8-inch round pan or another small, oven-safe dish.

Dump dried bread cubes into a large bowl with the eggy mixture and mix to coat. Allow the mess to hang out for 20 minutes so the bread can soak up as much of it as possible. Fold in the raspberries, and then pour the prepared pan.

Bake bread pudding for 30 minutes, until golden brown and puffed up. After removing it from the oven, allow to sit for a bit to cool Cloud Desktop. Top with a dusting of confectioners' sugar to serve. This is so, so good the next day due to melding, which is the scientific process by which leftovers become even better than their earlier iterations because they’ve had time to relax and love themselves (or something).