Jeffels - baked beans with tomato sauce in toast

Two buttered slices with a spoonful of baked beans in tomato sauce in-between, grilled in a panini iron or special Jeffels-iron. Yum!

And to benefit extra from the iron in the beans, serve with some salad cress and fresh orange juice for vitamin C.

Burek

Bureks are spring rolls, also called samosa/sambosa/sambusek. Thin pastry sheets filled with a tasty filling, most commonly minced meat (when filled with cheese they're called fatayer - it's pretty much the same, though). You can make the paper thin sheets yourself (Tammy of Tammy's Somali Home shows how on her blog) or buy them at any supermarket (spring roll pastry suits perfectly).
Different variants of burek/samosa are eaten all over the world. They seem to have merged somewhat over the years with the spring rolls, summer rolls, egg rolls, börek, et al.

The most used filling in our house is;

Minced meat filling

2 tsp olive oil
1 onion
500 g mince meat
olives cut in rings
salt, pepper and harissa to taste
eggs and chopped parsley
soft cheese

Fry the onions soft in the oil, add the mince and fry until all the redness is gone. Add olives and seasoning and let it cook for awhile. In the end add eggs and parsley, but don't let it cook dry!

Take a spring roll sheet, put about a spoonful of the filling in one corner together with some soft cheese and roll it, tucking in the sides as you go.

Deep fry or cook under the grill with some oil brushed over them. If you put the opening down first, you don't need anything to stick the ends to the rolls with.


According to Wikipedia: Swedes eat 1,2 spring rolls per person per year, the Danish 7 spring rolls per year, and Norway 1,4. lol

Mtabbal, commonly called Baba Ghannoush

This is a yummy dip, often included in Middle Eastern mezze.

2 medium-sized aubergines (egg plant)
2-3 tablespoons of Tahini (sesame paste)
salt, pepper
juice of one or two lemons
1 garlic clove
olive oil
a dash of paprika powder
parsley for garnishing

Poak the aubergines witha fork and put them on a greased oven-proof dish or some aluminium foil. Grill for about minutes, in the oven, turning them occasionally, until the skin has changed colour. Take the aubergines out and peel them once they have cooled off.

Put them in a mixing bowl, and add 2-3 tablespoons of Tahini, salt, pepper, the juice of one or two lemons, and 1 crushed garlic clove. Mix with a blender or hand mixer and taste. The garlic should not be too strong, because its taste matures and gets much heavier with time. Add more lemon juice if needed.

Arrange the dip in a plate, sprinkle red paprika, drizzle some olive oil over it and decorate with some parsley sprigs.

Place it in the fridge, preferrably for at least a few hours before serving it with pita bread as a side dish to a main meal or as an appetizer.