A whole lotta Mezze

Before I get too ahead of myself - I have joined up with the Daring Kitchen (both cooks and bakers) and the following is my first ever cooks challenge. I'll explain more later but for now...

The 2010 February Daring COOKs challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Dugid.

This challenge was a blast. I had so much fun. Great choice Michele!! Not only are the hubs and I huge fans of Middle Eastern food, but I was excited to try my hand at making two of my favorite things. Pitas and Hummus - from scratch! For the challenge the only two requirements were that we make pita bread and hummus and the rest we were able to play around with. For those of you that are like me and have no idea what a "mezze" is - think heavy appetizer kind of meal - similar to Spanish tapas. The first thing I did was tackle the pita bread a day ahead just in-case things didn't work out and I had to start over. Thankfully everything went off without a hitch.

Dough rising - I used a combination of wheat and white flour.
Ready to be rolled out
Fresh out of the oven

I have never made fresh bread before - other than my cinnamon rolls - and all I can say is WOW. Coming out of the oven this stuff was amazing!! My big kid could not get enough samples as I was pulling them out and was super cute announcing that "Mommy...it's just like we have a bakery in our kitchen". He was so excited, but then again I think bread is his favorite food ever!

Next up was the hummus. I followed our recipe, but instead of tahini (which I couldn't find and didn't want to really go on a hunt for) I used almond butter, and I also added some sun dried tomatoes to mine because I had them and needed to use them for something. It was fabulous as well. The hubby and I really enjoyed this and I'll be making it again. Who knew it was so easy to make your own hummus??

For the rest of our meal I made lamb, baked falafel, cucumber raita, greek salad and baklava for dessert! We also had lots of veggies, olives and goat cheese to serve up with the pitas and raita.

The whole deal:

1. Lamb and Tomatoes
2. Baked Falafels
3. Cucumber Raita
4. Veggies, Pita, Hummus and Olives
5. Greek salad
6. Goat Cheese
7. More Pitas

And for dessert I made Baklava for the first time ever with was another big hit with the hubs!

Needless to say it was a lot of food for the four of us, but we really enjoyed it, and I had a LOT of fun with my first challenge. I can't wait to find out what our March challenge is! If you're interested in any of the recipes, you can check most of them out here.

I hope you all have enjoyed your weekend so far :). I'm on my last book so I should be back to regular blogging any day now!