Algerian Cuisine Cuisine Algerienne by Farid ZADI

CELEBRATE THE 3rd BlogDay ON AUGUST 31st

I'm also working on my food blog roll. Mostly I'm looking for food blogs from Mediterranean countries with a focus on food and culture. Outside of the Mediterranean I'll be following spice routes and silk roads. I suspect that I'll link to quite a few blogs from Latin America, when I see recipes such as Sopa Seca de Fideos or Migas- the connections to Andalusia and Hispano-Muslim cooking are obvious.

Edited to add my five blog picks for blog day in no particular order. I chose home cooks who seem to avoid the cliches that would be professional or professional food writers often fall into.

1. TriniGourmet
(Trinidad)
2. Indonesia Eats
(From Indonesia now in Canada)
3. Zlamushka's Spicy Kitchen
(Sweden)
4 this little mainyacha is learning to cook
(From Nepal now in NYC)
5. Malaysian Delicacies 

BlogDay2007

Nawal 2 Marmiton blog of the week

I haven't been keeping up the blog of the week on a regular basis. I found another Algerian blogger who focuses on food. If anyone knows of any others please let me know. Nawal blogs in French from Paris. Not all of the content is about Algerian cooking. However it does offer a glimpse into Algerian homecooking and how some dishes are modified by available ingredients. The traditional Lamb with peas for example includes Asian snow peas.

Nawal was in French Elle as a blogger of note.

Tasca da Elvira Blog of the Week

Tasca de Elvira blogs from Portugal in French. She has a recipe on her blog Tomatada aux Oeufs that is very much like some versions of shakhshukha, no lard fume though in any Algerian dish. I wrote a little bit about about how the Portuguese exported couscous to Brazil in The March of Couscous. Although, as far as I know, the dish was forgotten in Portugal, if contemporary versions exists it would possibly be through new waves of immigrations.

Since I still have not presented the Algerian pasta and flatbread recipes I promised last week, I hesitate to say what I will do with the Portuguese connection. Maybe cornbread.

She's posted two more recipes that are very remniscent of Algerian dishes. Poulet au Safran is a classic Spanish dish of chicken with safran, thickened with nuts and Aletria au raisin sec a very old Portuguese preparations, is a sweet pudding made from vermicelli and raisins. Actually if the liquor is omitted from the recipes they are identical to dishes that would be found in Algeria.

September 30 note: She has posted even more recipes that are very similar or identical to Algerian dishes. Very interesting to me, I do not know much about Portuguese cooking.

Love Sicily by Katia Amore and Ronald Ashri

Love Sicily

loveSicily is the creation of Katia Amore and Ronald Ashri, who decided that the South-East region of Sicily is a place they enjoy and love and the place they really want to be after having lived for several years in the UK working as university researchers in ethnic relations and artificial intelligence, respectively. Katia was born in the South-East of Sicily, in Modica, and grew up just 20 minutes away - in Ispica. Ronald was born and grew up in Limassol, Cyprus (another beautiful Mediterranean island). They got married in Sicily in a beautiful sunny April day in 2003. Of course, loveSicily is nothing without our wonderful collaborators in Sicily. Especially Salvatore Guarino, that teaches on our cooking courses, and Ezio Cerruto, that teaches the mosaic courses.

Another noteworthy site is The Awaiting Table.

The Awaiting Table is a real, hands-on learning experience based in the southern Italian town of Lecce, the gastronomical, architectural and cultural capitol of the Salento, the beautiful slice of fertile land kissed by two different seas.

Clifford Wright, who wrote the monumental A Mediterranean Feast will be teaching some courses at The Awaiting Table next year.

Blog of The Week

Blog Day 2005 was a huge success. Up until the day of the event 18,400 blogs mentioned Blog Day. The concept certainly encouraged me to explore blogs outside of my realm. I'd like to continue the spirit of that day by having a blog of the week on both of my blogs. For this blog I will focus on Maghrebi, African, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean bloggers and compare a traditional dish from the country the blogger is from with an Algerian dish.

I am very new to blogging. I started in mid-July, before that I posted alot about Algerian and French cuisine on English language food forums. I kept wondering where the other North Africans were. There were just a handful of Middle Eastern posters. We seemed to be under represented as is the case in most English language media.

As soon as I started blogging the world of bloggers from North Africa and the Middle East opened up to me, many quickly found me which never happened on the forums. The network is vast and the blogs form a sort of oral narrative. I've written about the importance of oral narrative in Arabic literature before. The Maghrebis tend to blog in French and of course Arabic. The Middle Eastern bloggers tend to write in English and of course Arabic.

So the larger media does not give a platform for our voices. We create our own through blogging. I hope to introduce you to a wide range of voices and faces, many I do not agree with, many I do. They all have some things in common. They are smart, sharp, make historical references, have an ironic and satirical sense of humour, talk of love, loss and pain, offer advice, a will, an aim or a plan. And yes there is politics. In short they offer their RAI.

My choice for this week's blogger is Haitham of Sabbah's Blog. . You can read more about him  here.  He was born in Kuwait, has Jordanian citizenship and is of Palestinian origin.

I present a Palestinian dish that is exactly the same as an Algerian dish.