These would make great picnic fare.
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These are the chicken kebabs with toum from the current COTM, Flavors of the Sun (which will also be the August book). I used Daring vegan “chicken” for the meat, and it performed well, absorbing the flavors from the marinade. The marinade was pungent and excellent, with olive oil, parsley, garlic, salt, Aleppo pepper, smoked paprika, and black pepper. The toum, which I made but didn’t make it into the photo, is an aioli-like condiment of garlic, olive oil, lemon and salt. The kebabs were flavorful enough to stand on their own, and in the future I might go for a lighter, perhaps yogurt-based condiment instead of the toum. The kebabs were served with a pistachio pilaf and grilled zucchini with pomegranate molasses, both also from the COTM. The recipe can be found online here: https://sahadis.com/blogs/recipes-and-stories/from-flavors-of-the-sun-chicken-kebabs-with-toum
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These are the spicy beef kebabs with tzatziki from the current COTM, Flavors of the Sun. I’ll just make my life easy and quote my report from over there.
I made these using Impossible ground. One package is 12 oz, but I kept the spices about the same as in the original recipe. I omitted both the egg and the bread crumbs. Next time I would include some kind of binder, maybe a small amount of psyllium or some ground chia. The kebabs have a lot of stuff mixed in, and it makes them a bit crumbly and difficult to handle. Note the chilling times in the recipe for the kebab mix, both before and after shaping. You won’t want to skip that. As it was, while they were a bit fussy to handle, I did get them grilled without losing anything to the grates.
Your seasonings here are onion, garlic, jalapeño (I used serrano), parley, cilantro, dill, paprika, salt, black pepper, and Urfa pepper. Suffice it to say these are well-seasoned and very flavorful. I realized at the last minute that I didn’t have any cucumbers, so instead of the tzatziki called for, I improvised a sauce by mixing yogurt with some za’atar and minced preserved lemon. I have made the tzatziki from this recipe before, and it is good. Served this with okra roasted with sumac, and rice pilaf.
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MelMM: I think the vegan “meat” companies should hire you to promote their products!
Lovely reviews, plating, and pictures as always. I want to try these after reading!
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I would note that the NY Times, who have great difficulty even finding Upstate NY, tend to overcomplicate things. Also, that article is behind a paywall.
It wasn’t behind a paywall for me. Same marinade here.
I rather post a Sam Sifton recipe than a recipe that looks like it hasn’t been tested, or a recipe where it looks like someone is capitalizing on a recipe where I have to scroll through Ads.
Feel free to post your own Spiedies recipe.
I live in Canada, (although I have a dozen cousins living in Binghamton and Endicott ), and I don’t like Wishbone dressing, so I wouldn’t be making spiedies with Wishbone dressing.
I was adding it so you would see this thread- and your post would get more traffic. I was not asking for a critique, dude!
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Anyone from Binghamton could tell you that spiedie marinade must include mint.
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No criticism intended, by the way. Thank you for posting the link. I don’t know where you are in Canada, but there are many of us French Canadians here in the Binghamton area, many of whose families came here via the mill towns of northeastern Connecticut.
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My relatives in Binghamton came from Aliquippa, PA. Irish- German- English background.
This recipe has mint.
That recipe sounds good but rather a bit gentrified for Binghamton! Here spiedies are always marinated, never rubbed.
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That’s a pretty good recipe. The original spiedie was made with lamb and the classic uses pork. Many here do not recognize chicken spiedies as authentic. Personally, I come down on the side of pork.
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I made lamb tonight, based on the Serious Eats chicken spiedie marinade recipe, using garlic, lemon, white wine ( I didn’t use vinegar- my vinegar is white balsamic so it’s sweet compared to wine vinegar), fresh thyme, fresh oregano, fresh basil, fresh mint, parsley, dried bay leaf and garlic.
We liked it. It’s pretty close to my souvlaki recipe, the main difference is the addition of mint and vinegar.
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Patterned tonight’s dinner after this recipe, but was chatting via text with sister while combining the shrimp rub ingredients, so I wasn’t paying attention and went a bit too salty. Even the sweetness of the peaches didn’t cut it. 
Didn’t do the green onions; used a small zucchini separately instead. And this is when I really miss having a grill.
Wine.
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Lamb spiedies and souvlaki are pretty much the same except for the bread.
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A couple of sources I generally trust led me to believe that halloumi could be skewered for kebab.
Halloumi and Vegetable Skewers
Halloumi and Vegetable Skewers with Pomegranate-Tahini Sauce
However, my skewers (which were the flat wooden sort, better for heavier meat items) completely busted the halloumi before I could reasonably apply any sort of heat. So, what we have here are skewerless halloumi, scallion, and Fresno chile kebabs, with olive oil and sumac. They were part of a grazing dinner with hummus, grape leaves, and baba ganoush I never got around to posting about for WFD last Friday.
It came out tasty, but has anyone had any luck trying to get halloumi on a skewer without breaking it?
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These are Daring chicken coated with olive oil and berbere, alternated with local peaches. I chose the firmest peaches from my CSA box so they would hold up to the heat of the grill. The contrast of the sweet peaches with the spicy berbere was very nice. I used a dry spice mix, and it was a hybrid of the recipes in Bryan’t Terry’s Vegetable Kingdom and Mourad. I included the citric acid in the Mourad recipe, and the ajwain, and tweaked the chile mix in Terry’s recipe to include Aleppo pepper.
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I made a beef kebab tonight with sirloin, onions, mushrooms, zucchini, tomatoes, marinated in red wine, olive oil, aleppo pepper and the last of the khmeli suneli I’d bought at Kalustyan’s about 5 years ago.
These mushroom kebabs look interesting.
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Nominations are starting for the September, 2022 Cookbook of the Month. Please consider joining us in choosing and cooking from a new book!
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