the Times of oman 100 october 2016
The Perfect Loaf Who Doesn’t love a good baguette? From their picture perfect shape, to their crisp-onthe-outside, chewy-on-the-inside texture. While there are many bakeries in Muscat, only Paul (paul-bakeries.com) turns out authentic French loaves. Go for a perfect, Parisian-style breakfast of fresh bread, unsalted butter, and a good cappuccino.
An Ode to Cloves
A New Omani Cookbook Omani cuisine meansmountainous dishes of rice enlivened with ginger, cloves, cardamom, and tart black lime; vegetables simmered with chiles in rich coconut milk; coffee laced with cardamom and rose water; and sweets flavoured with dates and saffron. The Food of Oman: Recipes and Stories from the Gateway to Arabia (Andrews McMeel, 2015),the first international Omani cookbook, is an introduction to the land, the cooks, and the recipes that make the Sultanate so unique. Find it on Amazon or magrudy.com.
Cloves are one of the spices that set Omani cuisine apart from other Middle Eastern foods, used to flavour everything from kahwa and chai to Omani-style rice dishes and shuwa meat rub. This particular ingredient earned it’s prominent place in the Omani pantry back in the olden days of seafaring and exploration, when Zanzibar was part of the Sultanate of Oman. As one story goes, an Omani Arab, Harameli bin Saleh was banished from Zanzibar after he committed a murder. Sailing through the Indian Ocean, he ended up in the Dutch-controlled Moluccas Islands (Indonesia) and risked his life smuggling out a live clove plant to offer as a form of atonement. He returned to Zanzibar with it in 1818 and the Sultan granted him a pardon and issued a decree that required all Zanzibari landholders to grow cloves. He alsomade removing live plants from Zanzibar punishable by death, an edict that stood until 1972. This broke the Dutch monopoly on the wildly popular spice, which was used the world over for medicinal purposes and as a flavoring agent, and it became one of Oman’s most important exports from the island.
The Recipes Zanzibari Kahwa Ingredients • 2 tablespoon Ground Arabic Coffee • 1 teaspoon Cloves • 1 teaspoon Rose Water Instructions • Mattis quam, vel rhoncus nunc erat a mauris. Morbi fringilla, tellus vel venenatis vestibulum.
Clove Scented Rice Ingredients Basmati Cloves 1 Onion Instructions • Mattis quam, vel rhoncus nunc erat a mauris. Morbi fringilla. • Donec non nunc ac felis pellentesque scelerisque.
• Vestibulum porta pharetratiam sed arcu turpis, a convallis nulla. Clove Icing Ingredients Cloves Confectioners Sugar Instructions 1. mattis quam, vel rhoncus nunc erat a mauris. 7