This week’s country that we chose via a random generator was Iraq! My husband was excited and instantly wanted shawarma! After going to the Middle East so often in the military (mostly Saudi Arabia), he always loved having shawarma again when he got there. We couldn’t do a traditional shawarma that is slow cooked on a spit and shaved off, but we did as close as we could and used the seasonings and sauteed the chicken in a pan.
When researching, I found the site Recipetineats and just used her recipes from her blog post as they sounded so good and easy to prepare. (Find the link to her post here.) I actually had shawarma seasoning already that I had bought from an ethnic grocery store in the fall. I teach a class called “Globetrotters” at our homeschool co-op, and I had prepared beef shawarma for them when we studied Saudi Arabia. So I followed the instructions on the bottle yesterday and let it marinate for 24 hours.
We decided that the other components would be flatbread, a yogurt sauce, marinated feta, and a roasted chickpea salad with lemon dressing. I’ll just share photos and let you see the recipes on the blog post, but we enjoyed the meal. The shawarma seasonings have a very warm feeling with cinnamon, ginger, etc. The yogurt sauce definitely helped freshen it up, along with the chickpea salad. My family didn’t like the chickpea portion of the salad as much as I did, but several of them aren’t a huge fan of any type of bean anyway. I thought the acid from the lemon dressing was really nice with what could be a warm and heavy meal.
This meal was a good one, but it made a LOT for cheap. The kids will have plenty for leftovers tomorrow. The author of the blog comments that she often does this meal for friend gatherings because it is so cost-effective, and I can see why.
Overall, we gave it an:
8/10
We would probably make this again, and we are all very full from it!
The Gephardts 