Category:Arabian Meat Dishes

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The Arabian Gulf swarms with food fish. A few that once were highly prized are now seldom eaten: na'ud, shark, reputedly delicious if boiled for hours, and lukhmah, sting-ray, beaten with rice into a sort of puree. But the fat-fleshed grouper, hamur, the porgy, shfri, and king mackerel, kan'ad, are daily food up and down the coast, either made into a stew as humble or rich as the larder allows or fried and taken with rice. The rice might be makbus, pink from the addition of tomato paste, or muhammar, slightly ruddy and a bit crusty from either dibs or carmelized sugar with which it is cooked. More elegant is the dish mashkhul, made with tender, trout-sized gray subayti. The fish is slit open and filled with onions that have been sauteed in oil with ground cumin, cinnamon, turmeric and black pepper, a blend called buharat the Saudi housewife buys ready-mixed. Then fried whole in the same spice-flavored oil, the fish is presented with a garnish of limes atop a bed of rice.

Other regional favorites are kubbat maraq: balls of rice spiced with turmeric, pepper, cumin and dried lime are shaped around a center of fried ground meat, onion and parsley and set to simmer in a sauce flavored with tomato; and fi qa'atah: a three-layered dish served as rice on the bottom, meat in the middle and almonds on top. It's cooked, in fact, top side down, for the name literally means "at the bottom." The meat is very spicy: thick slices of lamb, occasionally veal, first rubbed with cumin, allspice, garlic, salt and pepper are hours later braised in water with cinnamon, cloves and cardamom.