Italianese? Lebalian?

I had a bunch of leftover leek from that atrocious Full Moon Udon idea, and some tomatoes from the Rigatoni, so naturally I made some… Lebanese Chicken Stew? Sure, that's the most logical solution to using up leeks and tomatoes. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to go back to making ordinary meals after this project is over.

The best part about the Lebanese stew is that it gave me an excuse to buy a bunch of fresh dates. The recipe only required a tablespoon of chopped dates, but I still had to buy a whole package of deliciousness. The amount of sweetness added by a little bit of dates is actually pretty impressive and sort of adds a molasses-like flavor to the stew. This is not exactly what I'd consider a stew to be like at all, such as a thick soup, but more like stew as a method, like how the chicken in it is cooked. As with any stewed meat the meat was tender, the flavor was a little strange, though I think with a bit of tweaking could be quite good. I sort of have a thing with sauces comprised of tomato and things we wouldn't normally consider savory, like cinnamon and nutmeg. It's a very "warm" flavor.

I had originally planned to make this Lebanese-style rice pilaf to accompany the stewed chicken, but I apparently ran out of long grain rice and had to improvise. In this case improvisation is a bit misleading, since it sort of skews the entire recipe. I made what I'd call Lebanese Risotto, which is what happens when you cook with Arborio rice instead of long grain, I guess. This involved a cooking technique I've never heard of before, which is toasting noodles before cooking them. 2 tablespoons of toasted noodles made all the rice taste like, well, noodles. This was definitely a fun novelty dish, but if I'm going to make a starchy dish that tastes like noodles, I'm just going to make noodles in the future.