Recipe for Oozy

Food is a very important aspect of the Middle Eastern culture. To Arabs, food is their happiness; it's the solution to everything. Any gathering must include their delicious cuisine.  For my first topic, I thought of sharing a recipe of one of my favorite dishes. Oozy is basically rice, vegetables, and ground meat rapped in a pastry sheet and is usually served with plain yogurt and/or meditation salad.

Ingredients:
2 cups of rice
1 pound of frozen green peas
1 pound of cut carrots
11/2 pound of ground meat
1 packet of Apollo Fillo pastry sheets
Salt and pepper
1 stick of butter or canola oil
1/4 cup almonds

Directions:
1. Brown the ground meat in a pan and add salt and pepper to taste
2. Sauté the carrots and peas with 1/4 stick of butter then combine with ground meat
3. Cook white rice
4. Fry the sliced almond with 1 tbsp canola oil; keep stirring until they brown
5. Melt the rest of the butter. With a pastry brush, grease a 1/2 cup bowl with the butter
6. To mold the oozy in a round shape, place a pastry sheet in the greased 1/2 cup bowl
7. Fill the bowl up with first the almonds then the peas and carrots mixture then the rice .
8. Then fold in the edges of the pastry sheet to close the oozy up.
9. Take the oozy out of the bowl and place it on a baking sheet
10. Finally, broil oozy until it browns

About This Blog

The Middle Eastern (Arab) culture at this time is very misguided and misinterpreted mainly because the public doesn’t know much about it. With this blog, I hope to change this present issue through posting about basically every aspect of this culture to give the reader a better idea of what the Middle Eastern culture is really about.

As a Middle Eastern woman, I was a little disappointed to find that there weren’t many blogs written by middle easterners about their culture. What I mainly found were blogs giving information about Middle Eastern politics, language, and religion. Although those are very significant sectors of a culture, what I have in mind is a blog written in the point of view of a middle easterner that also discusses daily experiences which allow the audience to see this culture through a middle easterner’s eyes. All that is seen in the news is war, blood, and chaos. We need a new perspective, how do these people celebrate their joys, endure their sadness and interact in a daily basis. No article reading or TV watching will give us the same incite as first-hand experience.

Be it from our extravagant weddings to our delicious homemade cooking to our silly superstitions you will see every angle of the Middle Eastern culture through a 12 post blog. What better way to learn about the Middle Eastern culture than through an Arab. I live and breathe my culture every day and I cherish and find a pride in it. A culture cannot be fully understood from reading a dried text book it is a much richer and more meaningful experience to learn about it from someone who lives it. So sit back relax and enjoy my reading my blog.