This is a wonderful dish I have started making for my family to substitute a hearty and delicious beef sauce. We want to eat less meat, and more veggies, so if you are in the same boat- you will LOVE this dish! This pasta is made with a delicious and hearty vegan tomato sauce full of flavorful mushrooms marinated in garlic, shallots, and balsamic vinegar. This hearty sauce looks like it has actual beef, but it is much more flavorful and heart healthy!

My kids never choose to eat mushrooms, but they asked for seconds with this meal AND thought it was actually beef in there. I broke it to them, and they were at first shocked, but then happy to learn that they got their mushroom superpowers and enjoyed it! I love to tell my children about all the super powers vegetables and fruits give us. Mushrooms are rich in B vitamins and antioxidants such as selenium. These help our bodies fight all kinds of diseases, make our blood cells stronger, and provide us with energy. Mushrooms are also found to improve hearth and brain health, preventing various forms of neurological illnesses as we age. Mushrooms are also the only plant source for vitamin D, so if you follow a vegan or mostly plant-based life-style, mushrooms are very important! Mushrooms are also free of fat or cholesterol so they make for a wise and delicious substitute for meat.

The Flavor Agents

The texture of chopped mushrooms make them perfect to emulate that of meaty dishes. I use a combination of portabella caps and baby bellas, also known as cremini mushrooms. I simply pulse these in my food processor so that they are finely chopped to the consistency of coarse ground beef. If I have them available, I also love including dried mushrooms (such as these) because they often have a strong flavor that gives that unexpected umami that meat can have.

In a hot pan, I sauté the mushrooms in olive oil, salt and pepper until they become golden and all liquid has evaporated (the mushrooms release a bit of water while cooking). I then add some minced garlic, shallots, carrots and sauté them all together before adding the balsamic vinegar. This all simmers together to create an exceptionally tasty mushroom sauce!

Lastly, I add my homemade marinara sauce (any marinara sauce is fine), and allow this all to simmer for about 10 more minutes, for all flavors to combine.

This sauce is perfect for papparadelle pasta, penne, rotini, or whatver is your favorite!

For our busy weeknights, I opt to make this as a one pot meal. I add 1.5 cups of water to the sauce and throw in a pound of pasta to simmer right in the sauce! It really cannot get any easier, and all the flavors combine quite well this way. I have started using lentil pasta as it provides a nutrient dense source of protein. It also only takes about 6 minutes for the lentil pasta to cook al dente in this sauce.

Enjoy, from my kitchen to yours!

This is one delicious dish unique to North African cuisine. The deep green cilantro and chard stew the vegetables simmer in is a vibrant green hue for good reason. You can see the nutrition in its gorgeous color, and you can be sure that the flavor of this stew will inspire so many new dishes to add to your dinner repertoire! This green stew of chard and cilantro tastes fantastic and has that fragrant aroma of toasted garlic and cilantro common in some of my favorite dishes such as mulokhia, fasulya, or Syrian lentils with pasta. The stew is a broth braised with sautéed green chard, cilantro leaves, and garlic that is pureed into a fine green paste. This is truly a uniquely flavorful and nutrient dense stew to incorporate with many recipes, whether you wish to add fish, meat, or other vegetables. In the traditional Egyptian recipe of my grandmother, this healthful green broth is cooked with the nutritious root vegetable, taro, for a hearty stew to ladle over rice or quinoa for a delicious and complete plant-based meal.

What on earth is COLCASS or TARO?

Colcass is a common stew made in Egypt during the winter months. Colcass is simply the Arabic name for taro. It is a hardy root vegetable that is brown on the outside, but white flesh on the interior, with pink or purple striations. I could not find it fresh here in Chicago, although it is sold in the frozen aisle in any Middle Eastern market. I’d like to take minute to describe the incredible health benefits of taro below, but if you have no access to fresh taro or a Middle Eastern grocery store, then you could simply use potatoes or parsnips as I mention in the recipe.

Taro is commonly used in Asian and North African cuisines. Used as a local winter vegetable, it reflects the natural habit of eating what is in season. The vegetable is a brown tuber root that must be peeled. Once peeled, it is washed thoroughly to remove the slimy texture. The resulting vegetable is a gorgeous white and fibrous root that is similar to a parsnip and potato if they were cross-bred. There are pink striations throughout giving it a lovely color. Taro is high in fiber, antioxidants vitamins A, C, E, B6, folate, and it is even an excellent source for potassium, iron, and magnesium. Because of all of its high nutrient contents, taro is an excellent source of carbohydrates, and can help prevent heart disease and improve gut health due to all of the polyphenols found in the vegetable. It is definitely worth trying it, and is easy to implement if you use the frozen version from the Middle Eastern grocery aisles.

The Basic Ingredients

Taro, Parsnips, or Potatoes, the choice is yours!

As I mentioned, you may have a hard time finding taro. If you find it in the Middle Eastern market, you only need the vegetables in the bag, and not the frozen green herbs packet included (this recipe makes it from scratch!) Aside from using taro, you could use diced potatoes or parsnips. The most significant part of this recipe is the green broth made from the cilantro and chard. It’s important to use local and seasonable vegetables on hand, and because potatoes and parsnips are plentiful during the winters in Chicago, it makes for an excellent and delicious substitute. This dish inspires so many others because the broth is so tasty with many things. My kids could not stop licking up the broth from their spoons! I plan to cook this again with fish, cauliflower, chickpeas, and many other vegetables in this very broth. You will really love the base!

The Broth

Colcass in Egypt, is originally made with the broth of stew beef. My mom simmers meat with cardamom, bay leaves, coriander, salt and pepper when she makes this dish. Because I make this colcass as a plant-based version, I use vegetable broth but add on the referenced spices. I still sometimes cook stew beef on the side to offer it to my girls. They love this recipe with meat, and if you are a meat eater, please know that the meat is so incredible with the green stew of colcass!

Green chard and cilantro

To make the stew, you need one bunch of green chard, with the thick stems removed. You also need one bunch of cilantro leaves. Some cilantro stems are fine to include, as they are so full of flavor. You need to chop all the leaves in a food processor and then set them in a sieve to drain the water. This is so that you can easily sauté the greens to a crisp. If there is excess water, you will merely boil the leaves, but we want to toast them crispy. Once you add the garlic to the toasted greens, you will add some ground coriander, and the fragrant scent of garlic and cilantro will have you mesmerized. At this point, some broth is added and it is all pureed fine with an immersion blender, or a pestle if you have the patience and want to do it like my Teta (grandma in Arabic) did.

Once the remainder of the broth is added, I add cardamom, salt, and pepper and let it simmer for about 5 minutes.

Large, diced root vegetables are added, and if you are making the traditional Egyptian recipe, the cooked stew beef goes in at this point as well. The stew simmers for 5-10 minutes until the diced vegetables are fork tender. Potatoes can crumble, so you want to be sure to use a firm potato and not over cook it. The green stew is so flavorful and nutritious, I cannot wait to make this stew again with parsnips, potatoes, and even drizzled over white fish.

Check out my how-to video below:

This is a beautiful and festive bread shaped like a snowflake that I thought would be perfect for a gathering of friends during the winter season. It is known as star bread, but as my daughter said, “the star name sounds better for a tile, but it really actually looks like a snowflake.” Whatever you call it, we love it and how simply beautiful it is! This gorgeous bread can be seen everywhere online during the holidays and all over Instagram or Pinterest with all sorts of sweet fillings such as raspberry preserves, cinnamon and sugar, or yummy Nutella. I chose to make a savory version with a Middle Eastern spin by spreading the dough with a delicious spice and herb blend of zaa’tar. This zaa’tar star bread pairs perfectly with a colorful cheeseboard or a Mediterranean brunch spread.

What is Zaa’tar?

Zaa’tar (pronounced zah-tahr, with a guttural throat emphasis on the first aa sound and a roll of the ending sound rrrr) is a common Middle Eastern herb blend of savory thyme, oregano, toasted sesame seeds, and sumac. You can pick up zaa’tar spice mix from any Middle Eastern market, and it is even better if you can buy some freshly made. If you ever happen to visit a Middle Eastern country, be certain to pick up a fresh batch because the thyme that grows out there is very different from the one we grow here in the States. Zaa’tar spice mix should be green in color and while the flavor will vary based on the ratio of thyme, to sesame, to oregano, you can always adjust it to your liking with more sesame or sumac as I do. Zaa’tar is a truly amazing concoction of earthy flavors that you can sprinkle onto everything from breads, to roasted vegetables and salads, to poultry, meat, and fish. Food blogger Ali provides an easy recipe for this delicious savory spice mix for anyone to make their own zaa’tar on her website, Give Me Some Oven.

Making the bread

To make the dough of this bread, I used a seriously easy recipe by bake blogger, Sally from Sally’s Baking Addiction. She kept posting about this bread and insisted the recipe is super easy, and even filmed a how-to video to show you just how easy it is. She was right. I never ever made bread in my life, aside from one demo class I watched two years ago at a book shop. So getting out all the ingredients (yikes, yeast?! That was a first for me) and tools in a minimalist kitchen like mine, I thought it would be useful for you all to show you how a non-baker like me can easily attempt such a friendly bread recipe. Sally suggested using Platinum All Star Yeast, so I did. It worked like magic. I also followed all of her tips. I also- added more tips from my perspective of zero bread making experience. Trust me, it is a great and easy recipe and her video is very helpful! See my own video below implementing it!

My overall impression of this bread, while it was easy to make and the perfect dough consistency for zaa’tar, is that it can afford to be a bit softer. It is deliciously luscious warm out of the oven, especially if you are careful not to over bake it. I loved the ease of this recipe and I feel like I can whip it up any time! This would be an ideal bread to fill with cheese and zaa’tar mixed!

My next step is to try a fluffy challah bread recipe for the star bread. I think the sweet and soft challah just might prove an even better combination. I will be trying Zoe Bakes challah recipe for star bread next. Stay tuned!

Feedback on baking bread from a newbie baker

So this recipe is simple. It entails mixing the flour and other other dough ingredients with the yeast mixture and letting it rise for an hour or so and then shaping the bread. The rise time is technically 60-90 minutes and I usually don’t have the time to stay at home or in the kitchen long enough to prep the dough, let it rise, and then shape it and bake it because I have so much going on. So I prepped the dough mix, let it rise, had 2 meetings and a conference call and then I had to take my kids to tae kwon do. So I had to put the risen dough in the fridge. Sally advises how to do this and to let the bread sit on the counter for 20 minutes after removing from the fridge. Although I tightly covered the dough in the fridge I have to report it was a bit hard. I could still work with it, but it seemed a little dry to me. Everyone thought it tasted great nonetheless.

But I wanted to know what it would be like if I let it rise in a warm oven and then shaped it right away without fridge time. Again, I had to head out for some errands, so it rose for 3 hours instead of 60-90 minutes. Hah, really do working adults or busy parents ever have the luxury to count on 4 uninterrupted hours? I struggle with that. But I am happy to report that I simply punched the dough down, and shaped it, and it was so luscious and soft. Baked beautifully, and tasted even better than the fridge version. Is this safe to do with dough that sat for 3 hours rather than 90 minutes? I think so. Mama says it’s fine.

So from my trials, I would advise:

1. If the dough is too sticky after mixing, add 1-2 tbsp of flour so that it is less sticky, but still soft (check my video).
2. Do not refrigerate the dough if you do not need to, the texture will be better this way.
3. For the zaa’tar mix, be sure to use my ratio of oil so that it is not too moist on the dough like it was in my first trial, making it difficult to shape. The zaa’tar mixed with oil should be a thick paste, not a liquid spread.
4. When shaping the dough into circles, roll it out into a ball, press down into a circle, and then roll it flat into a thin, large 8-9″ diameter. The first time I rolled out the circles they were too small and thick, and so was my end snowflake bread too small and thick. Think large thin circles here! Again, see the video.
5. Be sure to use an egg wash on the top of the shaped dough BEFORE baking as it truly lends a gorgeous glossy and golden crust. Trial 1, I forgot and brushed the egg wash on after 10 minutes of baking, and it didn’t make such a glossy, smooth crust as expected.
6. Check the bread after 20 minutes, depending on the oven it may be ready. The first trial, I over baked the bread to a more golden brown crust by 25 minutes. The second trial, I checked it at 20 minutes and it was perfect by 22 minutes.

Happy Baking!