I’m more than happy to participate in a very beneficial project for women and girls. It’s called the Heart Women & Girl’s Project committed to empowering women and girls in interfaith and community settings by building self-esteem and leadership through health and wellness.  Last year, I gave a presentation to young girls at their first ever health workshop for Muslim girls in Chicago. I talked about eating right, showing healthy snack options, and gave a few sample recipes for lunch and after school bites. The girls were animated and interested in the subject and I could tell the workshop was something the girls not only needed, but wanted.

In support of this wonderful on-going project,  I’m giving away a bundle of My Halal Kitchen products- an apron, measuring spoon and recipe card. To enter, just go to the HEART website, and read my article, Eat Right and Feel Great During Ramadan (and a few sample recipes for iftar and suhoor). Leave a comment with your own favorite Ramadan recipe and you’ll be entered into their contest to win these goodies.

Here’s a sneak peak at the article:

Eat Right and Feel Great During Ramadan

 This year, fasting is a bit of a challenge considering the high temperatures and long summer days to endure without food or water. With the right planning and intention to keep our bodies healthy, fasting can actually be much easier than we realize. Use these tips to eat and hydrate in a healthy way, giving you the energy and endurance needed to get through the month while maintaining a healthy body.

Guard Your Suhoor

• Make enough time for it and make sure it’s a healthy one.
• Eat a complete meal with a variety of fruits, whole grains and protein, such as beans or eggs. Choose from leafy greens, and water-rich fruits such as watermelon, peaches and papaya.
• Avoid refined sugars and too many carbohydrates, which can leave you feeling exhausted by mid-day.
• Drink plenty of water or real juice, but don’t overstuff yourself with these, either.

Don’t Sleep the Day Away

• This is particularly important after the suhoor meal because digestion and circulation cannot occur if you spend half the day in bed.
• Additionally, you will slow yourself down by sleeping during the daylight hours meant for being productive.

Conserve Those Calories

• Avoid too much talking—yes, talking takes up a lot of energy and can actually bring on headaches. You need as much of your energy to get through the day so avoid unnecessary and long-winded conversations, especially futile ones that have nothing to do with work, family or the deen.
• Take it easy when doing errands or working around the house by maintaining a leisurely pace. Walk, don’t run and you’ll avoid losing the energy needed for your ibadah. We should remain productive, but choose our energy output wisely.

Break Your Fast Calmly

• Don’t be in a rush to eat. You won’t digest your food properly and could make yourself sick. Instead, break fast with a healthy room-temperature fluid like water, pure fruit juice or warm milk, as cold drinks are hard on your system. Have a couple of dates, figs, and a handful of nuts. Then, pray your salah and return to the table for a nice meal.

Ease Into the Iftar Meal

• Warm the stomach and slowly acclimate your body to food by having soup as a first course to the iftar meal. It’s not only easy on the stomach, but it also prevents over-eating with heavier foods that generally come afterwards.

 To continue reading this article and enter the contest, please visit the HEART Women & Girl’s Project website

Those of you who know me well enough know that my favorite cooking mentor is Julia Child–and it’s not because of the book or movie, Julie & Julia (although I really enjoyed both).

Around this time last year I completely absorbed myself in The French Chef videos, those early years where Julia Child enlightened the American housewife about how to cook French food. I was enamored with her from the first moment–and it was literally the first time I’d ever really watched her instructional videos. She was serious about food but could also laugh at herself. She knew how to teach, how to encourage someone to attempt difficult and multi-step dishes, even those with funny French names.

For an entire month I watched every single 1/2 hour video where Julia taught me how to make gateaus, wrap roasts properly with twine or perfectly blanch fresh green beans. Her scientific approach to cooking didn’t sound so scientific and those black and white videos of the food she prepared really made me want to jump right into the kitchen to satisfy my rumbling tummy. I just felt bad for my husband having to endure the jingly musical intro and exit tunes from each show. Other than that, he was a great sport about my new discovery, which soon became an obsession.

Fast forward to the present and my own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 (which I bought just before hearing about the Julie/Julia Project) is my most prized possession in my library of cookbooks. I don’t even want to cook around it for fear of splattering it with the orange sauce from the Duck a’la Orange dish or all that heavy cream used in Gratine Dauphinoise. I may cook well, but I’m not so neat…

Mastering the Art of French Cooking isn’t the only good cookbook Julia ever wrote, although it is a culinary masterpiece, no doubt. My own bad timing in ‘finding’ Julia is that now because of the movie probably all her cookbooks will be expensive and unaffordable. This Spring I was lucky, however, to snatch away one book people probably just overlooked at a recent booksale: Julia Child & Company. It contains many recipes for whole menus of appetizers to salads to whole roasted meats. She explains how to buy certain cuts of meat and then how to prepare them for a crowd. From this book, I chose our first iftar (meal to break the fast) to be the Chicken Bouillabaisse. 

I’ve made some changes to the original recipe. For example, it calls for enough ingredients to serve 6 people, but I halved it to serve 3. Some ingredients I didn’t have on hand so I chose my own substitutes. I also substituted white grape juice for the vermouth (alcohol).  It also calls for serving this dish with Rouille, a type of sauce. For the sake of saving time I didn’t make this addition and the result was still absolutely delicious. 

So, the recipe below is my own version, although you could find the original on pages 41-42 of Julia Child and Company by Julia Child. Published by Alfred A. Knopf. 1979. New York. 

 Chicken Bouillabaisse

• 1 chicken fryer, about 3.5 pounds, cut up into 8-16 pieces

• 1 cup white onion, diced
• 2 Tb. olive oil
• 2-4 garlic cloves, peeled and left whole
• 2 bay leaves, crushed
• 4 large tomatoes, quartered
• 1 tsp. ground fennel
• 1 tsp. french tarragon 1/2 tsp. thyme
• large pinch saffron threads, optional

• 2  two-inch strips dried orange peel, optional

•  salt, to taste

• ground black pepper, to taste

• 1 Tb. tomato paste

• 2 Tb. water

• 1 cup white grape juice (must be 100% juice of a high quality)

Directions:

1. Clean and pat dry all of the chicken pieces. Heat oil in a large Dutch oven or large, deep saute pan.

2. Add chicken and saute over medium heat, approximately 10 minutes. Turn pieces several times during this process so as not to allow the chicken to brown too much.

3. While the chicken is cooking, prep the onions. Once the chicken appears stiffened, remove it from pan. Add the onions to the heated oil and saute for about 5 minutes.     

4. During this time, prep the tomatoes and garlic.

5. Add the tomatoes and garilic to the onions. Saute for about 1 minute.

6. Add fennel, tarragon, thyme and any other herbs or seasonings you want to add.

7. Salt and pepper the chicken on both sides and add back to the pan, covering with all of the vegetables. Add tomato paste and water and blend well. On medium heat, uncovered, cook the chicken on each side for 5 minutes.

8. *At this point you could allow the dish to cool, then cover and refrigerate if you would like to finish it off later on in the day or the following day. Just bring to a simmer again, covered, before proceeding.*

9. An hour before you’d like to serve the dish, add the grape juice. Mix well, then cover and allow to simmer for one hour.

10. Mixture should be a good consistency- not too thick, but thin enough to serve in a soup bowl. Top with chopped fresh parsely and serve with a rustic Italian, French or pita bread for dipping. Or, serve with a side of white rice or couscous.

Bismillah and Buon Appetito!

Before beginning, allow me to extend a warm Ramadan Mubarak! (Ramadan Greetings) to all the readers of My Halal Kitchen. Thank you for your generosity and kindness in words and deeds in support of this site. May you all have a blessed month!

We can’t discuss food in Ramadan without first talking about the significance of the date fruit…

During a recent shopping trip, I saw several people buying those large, red boxes full of California Medjool dates—one of the earliest signs that Ramadan is fast approaching.

My dad first introduced them to me over a kitchen table full of board games and Sicilian snacks: pistachios, hazelnuts, dried figs and large, plump dates. He often joked with me that those were the only kinds of ‘dates’ I could have at the time. Little did I know then that this fruit would become a very significant part of my adult life and I’m so glad I grew accustomed to its taste when I was so young.

  While date palm trees, known as nakhl in Arabic, come from hot and dry climates around the world, it’s fruit (tamr in Arabic) is beginning to grow in popularity everywhere. The health-conscious consumer is looking to this bite-size snacking option as an alternative to other less desirable ones, thus re-discovering the date in all its varieties as an extremely beneficial addition to one’s diet. 

Dates are closely associated with Muslims, even though the palm tree has been around since pre-historic times and is also historically significant to many other cultures and religious groups.

In the Holy Qur’an, the precious date has been mentioned many times as a favorable food. For example, Mary, mother of Jesus, was ordered to shake the date palm tree when she was experiencing the pangs of childbirth in order to eat of the date fruit, thus relieving some of her pain. [1] 

  They were also consumed as a staple food of the beloved Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him). He used to break his fast with fresh dates before praying; if there were no fresh dates then with dry dates, and if there were no dried dates, he would take a few sips of water. As a result, the Ramadan tradition of breaking the fast with dates has become a sunnah, or action of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), that Muslims readily follow. [2]

Regardless of one’s intentions for eating dates, they are known to be a great source of fiber that can be easily added to one’s diet. They are also high in the B-complex vitamins, magnesium and potassium- vitamins your body needs to eliminate toxins and build healthy bones.

Dates also contain naturally occurring sugars like fructose and glucose, giving your body a good deal of energy without the sugar crash that comes along with most unhealthy, sugar-filled foods. [3]

  How to Incorporate Dates into Your Diet: 

1. Top your cereal or oatmeal with chopped dried dates for added crunch and fiber.
2. Buy the seedless varieties and fill with whole almonds for a great on-the-go snack.
3. Chop and add to salads for a sweet addition to an otherwise savory plate.
4. Dip in heavy cream or yogurt and wrap in bread for a delicious snack
5. Remove seeds, dice and freeze dates for future baking projects

Dates are also the perfect baking fruit- they freeze well, don’t make your baking products soggy and add just the right about of sweetness to a dessert. Check out this tart recipe from one of my favorite and most-used cookbooks, Mediterranean: A Taste of the Sun in Over 150 Recipes by Jacqueline Clark and Joanna Farrow.

Date and Almond Tart 

The original recipe calls for a homemade pastry dough. I have improvised, however, by suggesting you use a pre-made pie crust (preferably the Trader Joe’s brand) in order to save time. I’ve also made more specifications on the types of ingredients used.

 Filling Ingredients

• 1 frozen pie crust, defrosted in the refrigerator and kept chilled until just before use
• ½ cup unsalted butter
• 7 Tb. caster sugar or brown sugar
• 1 large egg, beaten
• 1 cup ground almonds
• 2 Tb. white whole-wheat flour
• 2 Tb. orange flower water (orange blossom water)
• 12-13 fresh dates, stoned and cut in half long ways
• 4 Tb. apricot jam

Directions

 1.      Preheat the oven to 400º F/200ºC. Place a baking sheet in the oven.

2.      Cream the butter and sugar until light, then beat in the egg.

3.      Stir in the ground almonds, flour and 1 Tb. of the orange flower water, mixing well.

4.      Roll out the pie crust onto a glass baking dish. Spread the mixture evenly over the base of the pie crust.

5.      Arrange the dates, cut side down, on the almond mixture.

6.      Bake on the hot baking sheet for 10-15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350º F/180ºC. Bake for another 15-20 minutes until light golden and set.

7.      Transfer the tart to a rack to cool.

8.      Gently heat the apricot jam, then press through a sieve. Add the remaining orange flower water.

9.      Brush the tart with the jam and serve at room temperature.

 Bismillah and Buon Appetito!

[1] Surah Miriam in al-Qur’an, 19:23-26

[2] Book of Al-Sawm (Fasting), classed as Sahih by Albani in Sahih Abi Dawood, no.560 as narrated by Anas ibn Malik

[3] www.familynutritiononline.com