Month 3 day 2: Chicken Shawarma and roasted carrots

Today I made:
Spicy Chicken Shawarma, Cooking Light April 2010
Roasted Carrots with Za'atar, Food Network Magazine April 2010

I was a little bit worried about cooking dinner tonight, because we got an enigmatic email from our house manager this afternoon: "The drill may be any early evening now."
We had already gotten emails saying that a fire drill would take place sometime in the next week or so, so most of us interpreted this email to mean that he knew it would be tonight. Especially ominous were the flashing lights at one of the nearby dorms I passed on my walk home. So I figured I had to be super fast cooking to get everything done before the alarm started.
I didn't make it. G came home when I was mostly done and said that the housing crew were already outside and had told him it wasn't even worth going to his room because it was going to start. I was one chopped onion away from finishing when the alarm started! If only we had been able to eat as we waited outside. Luckily, since it was just a drill, they could let us in pretty quickly once they decided that everyone had made it out in the allotted 5 minutes. The woes of living in a dorm!

I liked this dinner. It was very quick to do. The carrots just got rubbed with salt, pepper, and oil and then roasted. The chicken was briefly mixed with a yogurt and spice sauce and then put on the stove, and in the time it took to saute I was able to mix up the yogurt-tahini sauce and cut up most of the vegetables (and evacuate the building).

Recently a labmate brought in cucumbers and quark, a German yogurt/sour cream like product, as a snack, and we've been thinking about it a lot. It's simple but so good! So today's dip, just some yogurt, tahini, and lemon juice, and garlic, reminded me of that. I should mix up a little more to dip the extra cucumber in.

The carrots were just simply roasted, then spritzed with some lemon, parsley, and za'atar. What is za'atar, you might ask? A month or so ago I would have been in your same naive position, but it was in a gift package by my cousin and his wife! So when I saw that recipe I was very excited to put it to use. It's a Middle Eastern kind of spice, with sesame seeds, thyme, sumac, marjoram, savory, and salt. It had a really interesting flavor that I can't describe, but it must have been the sumac, because I think that's the only one of those ingredients that I haven't had by itself. Sort of a smokey or earthy flavor? But those words aren't really right.

I liked these recipes and will keep both. G says he just wanted a burger. He's sad because at lunch he wanted to go to the Whitehead Cafeteria for a Chang burger (with onion rings, BBQ sauce, and bacon) and I suggested that we have some of the leftovers in the freezer instead. What a terrible burden, to have home-cooked food all the time!