Beef Kebabs, Yellow Rice + Baladi Salad

Today I'm going to show you how I like to prep some yellow rice, a little kind of Egyptian-inspired baladi salad, some beef kebabs, and then a little white sauce to top it all off. So let's cook. Okay, so one of the best lifestyle skills I think a lot of home cooks need to learn is not to only cook when you're hungry, but to actually find those times and gaps in work or the day or the weekend and figure out how to make meals, you know, when maybe you're not necessarily hungry, but you can prep some of these components ahead of time and set yourself up for success when you do ultimately get hungry. Because I know for a lot of us, you know, life can just hit us fast and it's like, oh my gosh, it's 7, 730 and you're like, I have no idea what to make for dinner. But if you can learn how to maybe prep just one component or a couple components ahead of time, it then sets you up and makes the rest of the process easier. And you know, a dish like this or kind of a recipe like this, all of these components could be prepped ahead of time. You could maybe just do the salad first. We're going to do all three in this video. You could do the kebabs first and then cook your rice later. So really figuring out those style of recipes I think is really important. And not only cooking when you're hungry, but learning how to set yourself up for success for those other little gaps throughout the day. Like, you know, maybe you, maybe when you first get home, you have 30 minutes and it's like, okay, well I'm just going to start my rice or whatever and get the rice done. And then I'm going to go about the rest of my night because I've got some other things going on. And being able to bring those things up and think about them as you're going throughout your day is really, really important. Again, more of a lifestyle skill of home cooks, which are kind of those harder skills to learn because they're all very unique, you know, based on our, our constraints. So I've got the garlic chopped up. Also this is for the rice. I'm just going to quickly saute everything in here. So I've got this over like high heat. We're going to do some rice as well. This is just jasmine rice. Really any rice works. I do want to do some testing on different rice varieties eventually, you know, so many, so many different things to do, but for purposes of this, I'm just going to do volumetric. So this is, I'll add a little bit more water. So throwing in, toasting the garlic and the rice together. And then additionally, I've got two ingredients that are going to turn this into the yellow rice. So a little bit of turmeric. This is going to get most of the color and again, you don't really need much to make it yellow. And then chicken bouillon seasoning, or like chicken seasoning. Very common addition that a lot of like restaurants and stuff will use and used in a lot of different cuisines as well. You'd be kind of surprised, but this is mainly a salt and MSG source. And then it also, you can see it's a little bit yellow as well on my fingers. So it'll give it a little bit of yellow color, not much, but really I'm using it for the salt and kind of that MSG. And then this has got like onion powder and some other things in it like that. And then you could do this on the stove top in a saucepan. I just like toasting it ahead of time in a pan and then I'm going to throw it in the rice cooker back there. Again, more of a lifestyle thing. Like if you don't, you know, I'm going to, like this pan takes two seconds to wash and then I'll just keep it in my rice cooker just because I know it comes out pretty much perfect every time. Okay. So I'm going to put my ingredients away. Okay. Then next up, we're going to quickly make this again, kind of, it's like an Egyptian inspired Baladi salad. So there's this place in Austin, KG Barbecue. They always have this as a side. It's kind of just like red onion, tomato, cucumber, and then I think they add parsley to theirs. I don't have parsley. I'm going to add a little bit of Aleppo pepper, a little bit of cumin, lemon juice, and a little bit of olive oil. Just a really nice kind of make ahead salad. Holds up well in the fridge. All right. And then, like I said, just going to toss this all into, oops, spilled some. No worries. I'm going to toss this into the rice cooker and then adding probably, this is probably 1.25 or about 1.5 parts water. And then just like that, rice done and out of the way. Great example of like, you know, take five minutes, just throw it on the counter, get it done. Okay. So, next up, very simple salad. Also, this tomato, believe it or not, is from my little garden outside. I decided to see if I could plant some just because it is, you know, pretty warm in Texas and we got really lucky with the weather that a frost did not kill it, but yeah, this is literally from my garden. Another reason why I was like, man, I've got some fresh tomatoes. If you are just buying tomatoes from the grocery store, I would probably look for some cherry tomatoes just because this time of year, you know, like you're not going to be able to really find many great tomatoes, but cherry tomatoes are definitely still pretty good, especially in a salad like this. Also, my puppy is still working on his filming etiquette. So you guys hear some whining. Apologies. We're working on it. And then for me, I'm just going to throw everything into this container, which this is just what I'll use to throw in the fridge. Roughly going to do equal parts tomato, cucumber, and onion. So we're going to do, kind of cut these halves into three, roughly trying to match the size of those tomatoes in there. Kind of going for that chunkier salad, but I mean, you could make these any size you want. So cucumber, and then lastly, do about a quarter of an onion here. All right, then next up, we'll do some lemon juice, very basic vinaigrette of lemon juice and then some olive oil. So half a lemon, going to do a little bit of Aleppo pepper, just a little sprinkle, a little touch of color, and then also a little bit of, a little hit of spice. And then I'm actually going to grind up this cumin seed, just a touch. Love that. Okay, then last, just little spritz of oil in there. You know, that's really probably about 15 grams worth. Just like a nice, fresh, aromatic salad. And then like all these flavors too, like they'll sit really nice. So there you go. Component number two done. Rice done. The bolognese salad done. I'm going to throw this in the fridge. And then last up are kind of the kebabs, which also I'm going to keep ridiculously, ridiculously simple. I'll actually keep out this, I'll just use up the rest of that lemon, why not? Wipe the surface a little clean. Okay, so this is, this is 93.7 lean ground beef. Kind of going for a little bit of a, you know, lower calorie variant here. If you use higher fat, like 80.20 or 85.15 or something, definitely will be able to get better browning. I mean, there's just no way around it. But you know, this is still going to be great with 93.7. Then for salt purposes, again, you can eyeball this. I generally like using 1.5% salt by weight. So this is, you know, a pound, 450 grams. So five to six grams of salt, normally pretty good for me. Then again, I just love za'atar. It's a mix of sesame, thyme, what else, sumac. It's kind of like already made to go. So I like keeping these very simple. We'll add, let's call it, call it seven grams of that. So that'd be about, you know, a little over almost 2%. And then we'll use that other half of the lemon in there, give it a little bit of tang. And then all I'm going to do is just grate up this other half of an onion. So if you have, if you have like half of an onion laying around, just grating it up, throwing it in ground beef, one of the greatest ways, at least in my opinion, to use it up. And always be careful with box graters. I know like people, I feel like I've had the most cuts from box graters, not, like I don't think I've really hardly ever cut myself with a knife, but I have definitely cut myself with a box grater and micro grater several times. So always be very careful with these guys. Just go slow, get it down to the nub and, you know, don't let that onion go to waste. So there in goes our onion and all we got to do is mix everything up. Trying a little bit from these guys. Okay, and then all that's left to do, I mean, form these into any shape you want. Again, you could put these on skewers over charcoal, like during the summer. I think that is the move for this. Like I do love that. What I'm going to kind of do is I'm going to do them in logs, but I'm going to kind of flatten them a little bit, which will just give us a little bit more surface area when we go to brown these. And then just being, I'm not trying to make these like look perfect or anything. I mean, they're just going to get fried up anyway and they'll just taste really good regardless. So loosely, loosely portioning these. All right. And also another example of like another stopping point where like you don't actually have to cook it. You could just make the meat, throw that in the fridge and then come back to it whenever you want to. So what I'm going to do is actually I'm going to do these back on the stove here. So let me switch up the camera angles, then we'll finish everything and put it all together. Okay, so ready to cook. I had this preheating while I moved stuff around. And I think this is another key I think a lot of home cooks miss is like not letting their pans fully kind of preheat and get hot enough. So right now I'm trying to get this above 400 degrees Fahrenheit. So we kind of get that really quick sear. And then just going to throw a little bit of oil down. And then we'll lay our kebabs kind of go up and down. And again, I have this positioned weirdly in the center like this just for filming purposes. Normally I'd want to have it over two burners in here. And then as always, this would be a great time to continue cleaning up some stuff. So I guess that's what I'll do just because I'm literally waiting on this. So just going to quickly rinse out that onion grater over here. Clean off the stainless steel pan that I use for the rice. And I'll even do my container that I use for the ground beef. Okay, so quickly got my dishes done. And then we'll go ahead and start scraping and flipping. You can see we got some nice like sticking browning points. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Little bit of color on there. So you can really see, I mean, if you like start to think about all the components like involved, like cooking does not have to be this stressful thing where, again, like I've got nothing to do. I've cleaned my dishes. I'm just waiting for this to sear. You know, I'm not like, I didn't wait until the last minute to do my cooking. Again, not always avoidable. But I think the more we ask ourselves as home cooks, like what is my whole day look like? Like when am I going to find the time to cook? And kind of have those conversations with yourself about, you know, whatever your situation is, whether you've got to cook for the family, for yourself, or you've got a busy day at work. Like trying to anticipate some of these things ahead of time really can set yourself up for so much success. And then you can make dishes that you really like too, obviously. But yeah, this is like one of the problems I think about a lot with home cooking where it's not really, a lot of the skills you miss out on maybe a very chopped down edited video is like, well, when do I find the time to clean my dishes? Like when should I be wiping away my cutting board? When should I be putting things away? So hopefully you guys can kind of appreciate that because like one of the things I think is good about this style of video is being able to just like, you know, like showcase some of these things. Like I don't know what you'll take away, but you know, I hope, I hope you get something out of it. Okay. These are probably done. I'm going to flip them. You could internally temp these too if you wanted to. But I can feel they're pretty firm. Get those nice smells from the browning. And then, yeah, that's really all there is to it. So I'm going to transfer stuff back, put everything in the containers, pop it in the fridge, and then I'm actually going to come back in a few hours and we'll kind of assemble the rice bowl with the kebab and the white sauce. So it is actually an entire another day later just because, man, during the winter it just gets dark so quickly. So like I want to try to get out in the evening and then by the time I get back from being outside, I'm like, well, it's kind of dark in here and it's just easier to film when I have at least some natural light. So here we are. But again, I mean, it doesn't really matter because this is like why I love making meals like this. And for me too, I swear there is a difference about having them kind of in individual containers and then heating them up together rather than just like having four pre-packaged things. I don't know. Maybe it's just some weird psychological thing. But for me, it always feels a little bit nicer when you kind of need to portion things out and build your plate still rather than if you do all the pre-portioning yourself. So we've got our yellow rice. I should do a little bit more. Also, I was snacking a little bit last night on this because I had to save it for the video, but I couldn't completely help myself. OK, so we'll do three of the kebabs and just warm this up. Oh, and then I forgot. So this white sauce I did make off camera or I filmed the clip. It's literally just one part mayo, one part whole fat yogurt, and then a bunch of dill, bunch of black pepper. Super simple, herby sauce. Really good. All right. Beautiful. And man, like these do really reheat quite nicely. Hopefully you can see this in the side camera here. OK, so to assemble this, you know, shake up the salad a little bit here and then I'm going to add this kind of directly over the rice. I think that'll kind of look nice. Get a little couple extra little pieces of cucumber in there. And then for the sauce, I'm just going to kind of drizzle this over our kebabs. We can obviously add more. And then another little final addition, I'm going to add just a little bit more of this Aleppo pepper. Just give that a little like fresher crunch. This is a topic I think I'll either make a video on this channel or the main channel, but I do want to talk about adding spices at the end of cooking. I feel like it's a very underrated technique that is really, really quite useful. So there you have it. I mean, kebab, a little spicy, a little creamy with the sauce. Just going to taste really good. We've got our yellow rice with a ball of the salad. I mean, that looks pretty amazing. Quick photo and then I'm diving into this. Dive in. These are some of my favorite meals. It's just like, it's very filling. It's rice. It's fresh. It's got all the aromatics you want in it. A little bit of that creaminess from that dill black pepper sauce. And then, I mean, yeah, I just love meals like this. And again, they feel so much fresher, even though, like again, this was just sitting in my fridge, but it feels like I just kind of made it. So yeah, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. Recipe for this will be up on the website as always. But, you know, feel free to adjust with whatever you happen to have in the fridge. I'm going to finish this and I will catch you all in the next one. Peace y'all.