La Tarzane leaves the urban jungle: Desert food

One of the advantages of being in Wadi Rum over the Eid holiday (true for anywhere in the Muslim world for that matter) was the large quantities of food available at every turn - weeks of work in the gym undone in mere days! It's been a while since my last food blog, and I only just realised that I don't think I've introduced you yet to Jordan's only real claim to a national dish, so welcome to the heavy yumminess that is mansef ...

I spent an afternoon with some women in the desert watching them cooking a mansef from scratch, so below for your illumination is a step-by-step account (you won't see me helping out though, as an honoured guest I was banned from even thinking about doing any work! Never mind eh ...)

So first you need a large amount of meat - and in the Middle East, when they say meat they usually mean lamb. You will have trouble if you're not a lamb-lover here ... and forget about any veggie main courses! This lamb was sacrificed the day before to celebrate Eid, so the meat was pretty fresh, and I got to watch the man of the house cut it up ready for cooking ...

The other main ingredient of mansef is jamid, which is basically dried and then rehydrated yoghurt - here in the bowl are the last few grains of dried jamid, which is mixed with water to turn it creamy again. The drying and rehydrating process also gives it a slightly different flavour from just fresh yoghurt, more ... meaty?

So basically, the meat and jamid are chucked in a large saucepan with salt, pepper and plenty of water and left to bubble for ages, and that's mansef! The meat is served with rice, which is cooked with fried onions and a bit of oil so it's good and sticky, which is important because you should eat mansef with your hands - everyone around one bowl, grabbing handfuls of meat and rice, squishing them in your hands into a ball and then flicking it into your mouth. Messy food!

Or if you're feeling a bit posh, you can eat it with shrak, which is a kind of very thin flat bread. I watched this being made too, but am completely incapable of recreating it, as the skill needed to turn it from balls of dough into very large and thin discs looks like it takes years to perfect ...